Challenges to a probate court order approving a personal representative’s (PR) fiduciary fees, discharging the PR from liability, & closing the estate; Abandonment of an issue; In re Temple Marital Trust; Effect of an appeal from a probate court ruling; MCR 5.801(A); Surman v Surman

Holding that appellant’s claims were either abandoned, precluded, or meritless, the court affirmed the probate court’s order. Appellant filed 16 prior appeals in this case challenging “his mother’s guardianship, death, estate, and family trusts, and the probate court’s handling of those matters.” In the present appeal, he specifically challenged the probate court’s order approving the PR’s request for fiduciary fees, discharging the PR from liability, and closing the estate. The court noted that he made 27 separate claims in this appeal. It found the majority of his claims were abandoned. “An appellant may not merely announce his or her position and leave it to this Court to discover and rationalize the basis for his or her claims. And, where a party fails to cite any supporting legal authority for its position, the issue is deemed abandoned.” It also found many of his claims were “precluded by MCR 5.801(A) because they relate to earlier probate-court orders that are not subject to review on this appeal.” And it found his remaining claims meritless, including his assertion that he “was somehow prohibited from investigating his mother’s death, and was ‘schemed’ into having money taken from [her] estate to pay for an investigation into her cause of death.” It noted that his “dissatisfaction with the results does not mean that his efforts were frustrated, or that a scheme was concocted to siphon money from” his mother’s estate.