Undue Influence and fraud

Undue influence and fraud, what’s the difference?

If you’re involved in a will contest or an inheritance lawsuit in Florida, you may have heard about fraud, and you may have heard the term undue influence. And you’re wondering what the heck is the difference between undue influence and fraud in Florida.

There’s very many aspects of fraud, there’s all types of frauds that exist out there depending on the legal actor. Depending on what duties were owed and what this person did. Undue influence is often called a kind of or a species of fraud. Both of these things need to be pled with particularity.

You’ve got to do more than say with a bare-bones allegations what happened. You’ve got to give the court some particularity. Why? That’s our law in Florida. Ask anybody who’s conducted a fraud trial, or an undue influence trial and they’ll tell you that.

Undue influence we usually think of somebody through coercion, or force, or pressure, undue pressure, forces somebody to do something. To the extent that when that person does that, it is really not his or her own free will. It’s the influence of the bad person who kind of made them do that. And they were susceptible to advances and they gave in. A little bit different than fraud which has many many aspects.