Hiring help: what Florida law says about delegation

The delegation frame

§736.0807 permits delegating duties and powers that a prudent trustee of comparable skills could properly delegate under the circumstances. The trustee's own duties concentrate into three verbs: reasonable care, skill, and caution in SELECTING the agent, ESTABLISHING the scope and terms of the delegation consistent with the trust's purposes, and periodically REVIEWING the agent's actions to monitor performance and compliance.

The statute completes the loop on both sides: an agent accepting a delegation owes reasonable care to comply with its terms and submits to Florida jurisdiction, and a trustee who complies with the section's requirements is generally not liable to beneficiaries for the agent's decisions within the delegation.

What tends to stay with the trustee

Delegation covers functions, not the office. The decisions that define the trusteeship — whether and when to distribute under the trust's standards, the choices the instrument commits to the trustee personally, the duty to keep beneficiaries informed — remain trustee work even with a full professional bench. Many trustees think of professionals as instruments of prudent administration under §736.0804 rather than substitutes for it.

Engagement letters, defined scopes, and periodic written reviews are the everyday shape of the statute's selecting-instructing-monitoring language. Which functions are prudent to delegate for a particular trust, and on what terms, is a fact-specific question a licensed Florida attorney or investment professional can evaluate.

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