Georgia State launches free legal clinic for property and inheritance issues
A home is more than just four walls and a foundation slab. It’s the memories of holidays gathering around grandma’s oak table, roughhousing with your favorite cousins or burying a beloved childhood dog in the backyard.
In Georgia, there are nearly 40,000 properties with no clear ownership reflected in the public record because the owner died without a well-defined will, trust or estate plan to pass it to the next generation. Without those, the state steps in.
In those cases, a house becomes heirs’ property, a somewhat aloof legal term that can have devastating real-world impacts as a common driver of involuntary home loss, legal experts say. But a new law clinic at Georgia State University is aiming to change that reality.
The GSU College of Law is partnering with the Federal Home Loan Bank of Atlanta to establish the FHLBank Atlanta Heirs’ Property Law Clinic, a new initiative to train law students to provide pro bono legacy planning to low- to moderate-income property owners and support people dealing with heirs’ property issues. It is the first in the state, according to GSU officials.
“When a home passes down informally, the law doesn’t see a family living there and a community growing around it,” Sarah Stein, the clinic’s new director, said at last week’s ribbon-cutting.
“It sees fractional owners, unnamed heirs, unknown parties, and in a fast-growing city like this one where every patch of earth draws an offer, that ambiguity becomes an opening for a tax sale, a call to a code enforcement, a knock on the door from somebody offering cash for your house,” Stein said.
While in criminal cases defendants have a right to counsel, that’s not the case for civil matters, like wills and inheritance. Every year in Georgia, hundreds of thousands of civil cases involve self-represented people dealing with issues like wills, landlord and tenant disputes and much more.
The issue of heirs’ property is important to the FHLBank Atlanta because it puts homeownership at risk, Reggie O’Shields, the organization’s president and CEO, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Each year, the bank gives at least 10% of its net income to affordable housing programs. It is providing $500,000 a year for the next three years to get the GSU law clinic off the ground.
“What we realized is if you buy a house and you haven’t protected it, then you could be at risk,” O’Shields said. “You’ve got to have a will, you’ve got to have a plan, and we see that as connected to homeownership and generational wealth and wealth building.”
Real estate makes up the largest portion of assets for Americans between the 25th and 99th percentiles of household wealth, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond.
But sixty percent of U.S. homeowners who make less than $50,000 don’t have a will or trust or estate plan, according to research from the FHLBank Atlanta. Property laws are complex, so even if a person has a will, that’s not always all one needs.
O’Shields and his brother experienced heirs’ property themselves despite their parents having a will.
“We read it, and it’s to us equally, period. And so then the two of us had to figure out, OK, what are we going to do? Who’s going to pay the taxes? Who’s going to pay the insurance? Who wants to live here?” O’Shields said.
“And you’re going through a period usually in this situation where you’ve just experienced a loss. Shortly thereafter you get this. You’ve got probate, you’ve got to negotiate with your sibling coheir,” he added. “Ideally you get that done as a homeowner up front.”
The metro Atlanta community has been reaching out regularly to the GSU College of Law for help on affordable housing, heirs’ property and tangled title issues, but before this clinic the school didn’t have a way of helping them, GSU College of Law Dean Courtney Anderson told the AJC.
Now, the school’s law students will have the chance to practice in an area of growing need where they can see cases through to the end, she said.
“It’s a good mix of legal skills, transactional work and education work,” Anderson said. “Affordable housing is a huge issue, of course, in the state of Georgia like it is nationally — so they’re able to just make that impact right away.”
Fulton and DeKalb counties have the highest total value of heirs’ property in the state, according to Stein, the clinic’s director. She sees this as “an immense opportunity” to have both a ground level and an ecosystem level impact on heirs’ property issues.
“Ground level because we will provide direct services to people who request and need them,” Stein said.
“And ecosystem level because we will be producing a new generation of lawyers, we will be aiming to support lawyers who are interested in this work and we will be approaching the issue of heirs’ property certainly from the position of lawyers, but from an understanding that it takes more than lawyers to address the issue,” she added.
Students began taking classes for the clinic this semester and Stein said they will likely start offering direct services to the community in early 2027.
Tips for homeowners to avoid inheritance problems:
- Create or update a will to include your current home or property.
- Ensure the deed to your home is recorded at the local government office.
- Develop a plan for your property to be managed if multiple heirs are listed.
- Consider establishing a trust or LLC to hold the property for multiple heirs.
- Communicate your intention for your property to your heirs.
Source: Federal Home Loan Bank of Atlanta