For Florida law firms
Administration handoff: from the approved plan (or the vault file) to the trust administration or the probate — the event, the facts confirmed, authority verified, no access granted
firm lane · Deterministic — no model call
Current availability
ShippedConfigured and enabled: a firm's administrators, attorneys and paralegals prepare and record; only the firm's attorneys verify authority and activate.
- Where it lives
- /admin/estate-plans/[id] · /admin/vault/[id] · /api/admin/handoffs · the firm's probate intake (/firms/manage → /api/firm/probate)
- What unlocks it
- when a client dies (or a trust's settlor becomes incapacitated), the firm prepares the administration from the approved documents — the version and its signing pinned, the facts listed to confirm, the scenarios the handoff does not carry named — and one of its attorneys verifies authority and activates it
Status is evaluated against this deployment's configuration by the capability-status service at build time; the catalogue's facts were last reviewed on the date shown.
Capabilities
- ShippedPrepared from the plan's newest approved, released version: its SHA-256 and the completed signing records of the instrument (the trust, or the will) pinned for good; from a vault file, its current documents — each one's identity and, where a copy is held, its hash.
- ShippedThe facts the source carries, each with where it came from (the plan's answers, the instrument, the signing record, the funding record, the vault file) — each confirmed as carried or corrected with its reason, once; a fact the source does not state is given with its source, never invented. Only decided facts are applied.
- ShippedThe scenarios the handoff does not carry, named from the records for the firm's own determination: a couples plan's survivor, a Florida homestead with a spouse or minor child, assets outside the trust, a will beside the trust, no completed signing on the platform, real estate in another state, a non-citizen spouse, a business, a beneficiary with special needs, someone left out, Medicaid planning, digital assets, and accounts that pass by designation.
- ShippedThe death or the incapacity recorded with its evidence — the matter's own clean document, its stored bytes re-hashed — and it grants no one access.
- ShippedThe fiduciary's acceptance of the trust or consent to serve recorded after the event; one of the firm's attorneys verifies authority with its basis, under the firm's authority policy, only once every fact is decided.
- ShippedActivation: a trust administration's dormant matter turns active with the decided facts applied (its file grant reserved as the flywheel's activation does); a probate is linked to the matter the firm's probate intake creates — opened prefilled from the handoff. Nothing is given to anyone: the firm invites the fiduciary separately.
- ShippedNo other click makes a handoff's dormant matter active — the database refuses it. A withdrawn handoff keeps its record and releases its dormant matter for the next.
- ShippedOnce active, the administration's modules are linked with what each still needs, the firm's determinations apart from clerical preparation: the Notice of Trust (filed — Rule 2.520 format, its version, the circuit's local-practice check), the Certification of Trust (furnished, as s. 736.1017 lists it), notices, deadlines, the inventory, the accounting and the closeout — or the firm's probate workstation.
Limits
- A probate is not prepared from a vault file — a will held there opens through the firm's probate intake.
- The handoff decides no legal question: authority, the fiduciary, whether probate is needed and how a homestead passes are the firm's determinations.
- Administration outside Florida (real estate in another state) is named, not handled.
- A vault file already opened as an active matter (the older one-click spin-up) is not handed off again — its administration runs there.
What EstateDraftFL refuses
| Reason code | HTTP | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| auth_required | 401 | The handoff needs a signed-in member of the firm's staff. |
| forbidden | 403 | The firm's staff keep the handoff. |
| not-attorney | 403 | Only one of the firm's attorneys verifies authority and activates the administration. |
| invalid | 400 | A field could not be read — the event, its date or its document, a fact's value or its source, the basis, the method, the reason or the probate matter — nothing was recorded. |
| not_found | 404 | That plan, file, handoff or fact is not in the firm's view. |
| not-approved | 409 | The plan has no approved, released version — a handoff is prepared from it. |
| no-instrument | 409 | The source has no trust (or no will) for this person. |
| already-linked | 409 | The vault file was already opened as a matter — its administration runs there. |
| out-of-order | 409 | A step comes first — the event, every fact decided, the consent, or authority verified. |
| closed | 409 | The handoff takes nothing more at this step — its facts are fixed once authority is verified, and an activated or withdrawn handoff is closed. |
| matter_archived | 409 | The matter is archived — its records are read-only until it is unarchived. |
| unavailable | 503 | The handoff could not be read — or the step could not be written — just now; nothing was recorded. |
Evidence
- supabase/migrations/20261001200000_phase13_administration_handoff.sql
- src/lib/handoff/model.ts
- src/lib/handoff/scenarios.ts
- src/lib/handoff/request.ts
- src/lib/handoff/server.ts
- src/app/api/admin/handoffs/route.ts
- src/components/handoff/HandoffPanel.tsx
- src/components/handoff/HandoffRecordCard.tsx
- src/lib/handoff/model.test.ts
- src/lib/phase13-part7-routes.test.ts
- src/lib/court-forms.ts
Last reviewed 2026-10-01