Who Can File for Wrongful Death in Utah?

The heirs of the decedent, right the person who passed away, can file a wrongful death case or the personal representative of the estate. Now, who can be heirs and who can be a personal representative is a bit more of a complicated legal question. Obviously, my advice as a lawyer is going to be if you have a wrongful death case, get an attorney involved as soon as humanly possible for a lot of reasons but one specifically being is an attorney’s going to be able to look over everything and let you know who is heir, who is the you know personal representative, who is able to file that case. So and it can be very complicated, it can be very convoluted. So the most common heirs, however, in these cases, are the spouse, the parents, or the children. And so we have issues that we run into, especially in Utah; we have no common law marriage, but we have a statute in Utah that provides for if someone has met the requirements of the statute or they’ve held themselves out to being a couple, being married, they have kids together, things like that, all these factors we can have the judge often times recognize their relationship as a marriage even after the death of the other person. So that changes who can bring a wrongful death suit. For instance, you have a situation where  there may have been a boyfriend and girlfriend who meet all the requirements of the statute, and before we go through this process, it’s only the parent or the child that or a brother or sister that can bring the case whereas, after we go through this process, we’re able to effectively get the couple married in hindsight in retrospect, and then the spouse can bring the case. Get an attorney involved as soon as possible in wrongful death cases.