Legal Question in Wills and Trusts in California

You misunderstand what you've been told. If an executor refuses to follow the will, the beneficiaries have standing to go to court and enforce the will, or allow the deviation to go unchallenged. Only the beneficiaries and/or heirs have standing to go to court. So if one of the beneficiaries is executor and all the beneficiaries agree to deviate from the instructions of the will, there is no one who can challenge them. Likewise, if the beneficiaries all agree to a deviation from the will, and the executor is not a beneficiary, but decides to go along, there is still no one to challenge it who has a legal right to do so. And that is why you don't find any citations, because it would never result in a court case to cite, when everyone who has a right to go to court just gives a wink and a nod to not following the will. Incorporating won't do anything. You are not a shareholder once you die. Your shares are in your estate, and you're back where you started. When the executor is NOT a beneficiary, however, and as the trusted agent of the decedent chooses to follow the will and ignore the beneficiaries desire not to follow it, you have a very different situation. In that case you DO have agrieved parties with standing to go to court - the beneficiaries. However, in that case as long as the executor is actually following the will, the beneficiaries would lose, and they would have eaten up a chunk of their inheritance, since the executor's attorneys' fees are paid out of the estate. Of course you rarely get litigation where the will is cut and dried. It's always where the beneficiaries interpret it one way and the executor interprets it a different way, or some beneficiaries think one thing and others think another, that you get litigation.