On petition by a trustee or beneficiary, the court may reform the terms of the trust, based upon a showing by the preponderance of the evidence and without any preliminary showing of an ambiguity, to conform to the trustor's intention if the failure to conform was due to a mistake of fact or law or a scrivener's error and the trustor's intent can be established. The terms of the trust may be construed or modified, in a manner that does not violate the trustor's probable intention, to achieve the trustor's tax objectives.
S.D. Codified Laws § 55-3-28
Terms of trust may be reformed by court
Applied in 3 court decisions — leading case In Re: Donald Hyde Trust (2014)
Most recently applied in Matter of Petersen Trust (August 2023)
Source: SL 1998, ch 282, § 6; SL 2016, ch 231, § 22; SL 2023, ch 161, § 10.
How often courts cite this section
Court decisions citing this, by year. The dip in the last several years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so recent citations are undercounted.
Official source: South Dakota Legislature. Reproduced from public-domain South Dakota statutes; confirm against the official source for the current text. Not legal advice.