> The [issue] insisted on hiring JPMorgan as an independent administrator in part because they wanted someone impartial to handle any disputes that might arise... Jo says. “They wanted assurances. So I agreed.”

I don't see any mention of lawsuits resulting in the involvement of JPMorgan, only those filed afterwards. The story [0] makes it sound like Jo acquiesced to hiring an "independent" administrator, which seems to be a case of no good deed going unpunished.

So I stand by the idea that complications from (seemingly voluntarily) hiring a third party executor for $230k puts the situation squarely within "first world problems", meaning caused by out of touch affluence. A family with lesser means would have had to work it out for themselves, under the pointed threat of the entire estate being immediately consumed by legal expenses.

[0] Granted, the whole article is in terms of her side of the story.

>>> Lawsuits ensued. Jo sued the bank. The bank sued Jo. Jo sued her stepchildren. The stepchildren sued Jo. The stepchildren sued the bank. And so on.

Neither Jo nor the children wanted to negotiate. They forced each other to have a third party and they fought until there was nothing left to inherit.

A family with lesser means would ruin themselves with a cheaper executor. It's really common.

That sentence is obviously talking about after JPMorgan was already on board. Do you have another article that states Jo was forced into nominating JPMorgan to act as the administrator, or which one of us is having the reading comprehension fail?

>>> The children, as Jo calls them, even though they were both adults when she married Max, insisted on hiring JPMorgan as an independent administrator in part because they wanted someone impartial to handle any disputes that might arise. “That’s what the children wanted,” Jo says. “They wanted assurances. So I agreed.”

That is the exact passage I had quoted.