By Stephen Walter, attorney and cofounder of Sunset
Something that shocked me when we started Sunset was how poor the information online was about the probate process. For instance, there are so many out-of-date county websites and generic, useless blog posts from lawyers.
After helping over 15,000 families with estate settlement across the country, I realized we were in a unique position to fix this problem.
This week, we launched a Probate Resource Center that is completely free and published on our website at hellosunset.com/probate. It is a guide to probate in more than 3,000 counties and cities. Every state has its own page, and so does every county, with excruciating detail: which courthouse you need to visit, which counter to go to, what it costs, what the clerk will hand back and the local habits that decide whether a family’s first trip to the courthouse is also their last.
There is no account to create and nothing to pay, it’s just free info online. If a family in your arrangement room asks where to start with probate, you can give them a URL that will answers their questions.
Along the way, I called hundreds of probate courts, and my team called hundreds more. That experience is what fills the county pages, and it taught me a few things I did not learn in law school.
Probate Court Is the DMV, Run by Nice People
I mentioned in my last article that most people picture probate court as an episode of Law and Order: a judge, a contested will, a lawyer sweating through an objection. In fact, if the family is getting along reasonably well, probate is a lot more like the DMV. You take a number, you hand over forms, someone checks them and stamps them. Except this DMV is run by nice people who want you to get through.
Our 2025 Estate Settlement Report Card gave the financial industry a C for how it treats bereaved families. If we graded county probate offices the same way, they would earn an A+ across the board.
Across hundreds of calls at probate courts across the country, I never had a single negative interaction. Clerks, deputy clerks and probate registrars answer the same hard questions all day from people at one of the worst moments of their lives, and they were patient with me and with our users every time. Much of what makes a county page useful started as something a clerk told us on the phone that appears on no website anywhere.
Rejections Are About Small Things
Of the thousands of filings we have reviewed, almost none were rejected for a reason a family would guess, like a disputed appointment or a bad will. The usual causes are one more certified copy of the death certificate is needed, a mailing address that differs from the street address, a form revision the clerk started requiring in March, or a local cover sheet that one county retired while the county next door still demands it. In every one of those cases the statute reads the same as it did last year. What changed was the counter. Families read a rejection as a verdict on their competence, when it is usually a piece of local knowledge they did not have.
The Simplified Paths Keep Moving
Most estates qualify for a streamlined process that skips full probate, and the dollar limits that govern it change constantly. Pennsylvania doubled the amount a family can collect from the deceased’s bank account without opening an estate. Arizona raised its small-estate limits last September. California indexes its threshold every three years. Texas has a muniment of title that transfers a house with a single hearing. A family that reads an article from 2023 will conclude they need full probate when they do not. That mistake costs months and, if they hire a lawyer for it, thousands of dollars.
What This Means for Funeral Professionals
When a family asks about probate, ask one question back: What county did the deceased live in?
Then point them to that county’s page using our tool. Tell them the clerk’s office is not their adversary and that a phone call to the courthouse is the single most productive 20 minutes in estate settlement. And tell them to check the date on anything they read, because in probate, a fact without a date is at best out of date, and at worst a rumor.
Every page in the Probate Resource Center carries a “recent updates” table and a “last reviewed” date. As more families settle estates with us, the pages will keep changing, because the counties do.
Twenty thousand estates and a few thousand county clerks built this. We just wrote it down.
Stephen Walter is an attorney and the cofounder of Sunset (hellosunset.com), which helps families settle estates end to end: finding assets, preparing probate documents, opening estate accounts and transferring inheritances. Sunset is free for families and has helped settle more than 20,000 estates, in all 50 states. Both of Sunset’s founders started the company after settling estates for their own family members.
Follow FuneralVision.com on LinkedIn.
