Lindsey F. Munyer

Munyer is a partner at Keystone Law Group, a probate firm that practices exclusively in litigation and administration of trusts and estates. She joined the firm in 2014 and made partner in 2019.

She remains working from home. "There's no sign of going back to the office this year," she said in late July as the pandemic raged.

Munyer said she became interested in estate planning during law school. "It came to me easily and I found it interesting. I didn't want to litigate; I got my LLM in tax law. I met with attorneys and picked their brains and learned that trusts and estates was a hot area. Now, I really enjoy it and merely doing planning looks boring. Trusts and estates keeps me on my toes. Probate is a unique and specialized area of litigation. I like the generational planning, the family aspect."

Family dynamics were on display in the legal drama over the rights to the fortune of multimillionaire businessman and movie producer Stephen L. Bing, found dead in June, an apparent suicide, after falling 27 stories from his Century City apartment. He was 55 and had clashed publicly with his wealthy father Peter over the estate's trustee's effort to cut Stephen's two children out of the family trust on the ground they had been born out of wedlock. Peter Bing was quoted as saying he did not consider them his grandchildren.

Munyer represents one of the children, Kira Kerkorian Bing, whose alleged father, Kirk Kerkorian, famously once hired an investigator who swiped a piece of dental floss from the trash to prove via DNA sampling that the child was actually Stephen Bing's, the result of an affair with Kerkorian's then-wife, tennis pro Lisa Bonder. Munyer's job was to persuade a probate court that the irrevocable trusts established by Peter Bing should be interpreted to include Kira as a beneficiary. In the Matter of the Peter S. Bing GC-1 Trust, 19STPB01612 (L.A. Super. Ct., filed Feb. 20, 2019).

"This was a storied L.A. family," Munyer said. "Large sums of money passed from the grandfather, Leo Bing, to the father Peter to Stephen, the father of my client. Kira was the first born. The trustees took the position that because she's a non-marital child, she was not a beneficiary." The other child in the case, also born out of wedlock, was Damian Hurley, the son of Stephen Bing and actor Elizabeth Hurley.

Munyer argued that the trusts were unambiguous about the term "grandchild" and that they could not be interpreted to exclude a biological grandchild. Without requiring a trial, the court ruled in Kira's favor. The matter is on appeal.

"The construction or interpretation of wills and trusts can be very interesting," Munyer said. "They can be intellectually stimulating."

-- John Roemer