In re Estate of Cole
Court of Appeals of Minnesota
621 N.W.2d 816 (2001)
Ruth Cole's will left "two hundred thousand dollars ($25,000)" to her friend Veta Vining (plaintiff); the estate's personal representative (defendant) sought to construe the bequest as $25,000, offering the drafting attorney's affidavit explaining he had copied and pasted another bequest reading "two hundred thousand dollars $200,000," then changed the beneficiary's name and the numerals to $25,000 but forgot to update the written-out words. The trial court granted summary judgment construing the bequest as $25,000 based on this evidence, and Vining appealed, arguing the court shouldn't have considered evidence outside the will itself.
Whether a court may consider extrinsic evidence of a testator's intent to resolve an ambiguity in a will's bequest — here, a direct conflict between a written-out dollar amount and a numeral — regardless of whether the ambiguity is classified as patent (apparent on the will's face) or latent.