Robert H. Sitkoff discusses his work on the Uniform Directed Trust Act (UDTA) in Harvard Law Today. The UDTA provides rules to the unique issues faced in directed trusts, a structure that involves the division of trust administration between the trustee(s) and a trust director.
Professor Sitkoff chaired the committee that drafted the UDTA, which the Uniform Law Commission (ULC) approved on July 19. He was joined by state commissioners, trust banks, trust lawyers and academics in the two-year drafting process. He expects the Act will be introduced into state legislatures across the country in upcoming sessions.
He is also collaborating with the committee’s Reporter and Yale Law School professor John Morley on two papers on the Directed Trust Act. One is directed toward practitioners, and discusses details of the Act and why it’s useful. The other is a scholarly article that investigates why this shift in the structure of trusts has occurred.