A lawyer named Robert Huckaby built a Nevada trust to shield his Lake Tahoe cabin from the IRS. He called it the Circle H Bar Trust. He put himself in every seat. Settlor. Trustee. Beneficiary. The IRS came for $87,959 in unpaid taxes. He defended the trust in court. By himself. He lost.

Look. I find this one fascinating. Not because a trust failed. Trusts fail all the time. But because the pipe that broke here is the same pipe sitting in half the asset protection trusts in this country right now.

Courts follow the dirt. Not the trust paperwork.

Here is the rule that killed Huckaby's trust:

That's the Restatement (Second) of Conflict of Laws, Section 280. In plain English: if the land sits in California, California law controls. Not the law on the trust document. Not Nevada. Not South Dakota. The state where the dirt is.

Huckaby's cabin sat in California. California law applied. His Nevada trust document was wallpaper.

Then California pulled the kill switch. Probate Code §15304(a): if you built the trust, you benefit from the trust, and you run the trust? The creditor shield doesn't exist. California treated Huckaby as if he owned the cabin outright. No trust. The IRS lien attached.

Two failures. Stacked.

No appellate court has ever upheld a domestic asset protection trust against a creditor who showed up and fought. Not once. Huckaby is not the exception. He is the pattern.

The trust held the deed. The deed pointed to the dirt. The dirt sat in California. California ignored the trust.

The fix is a box.

You form an LLC. The LLC holds the deed. The trust holds the LLC membership interest. The trust never touches the dirt.

Why does this matter? Because an LLC membership interest is personal property. Not real property. Personal property follows the law of the state where the LLC was formed. Not the state where the land sits.

One move. The whole question of which state's rules apply flips.

Your trust holds shares in an Arizona LLC. Arizona law governs those shares. Not California law. The dirt rule that killed Huckaby never fires. The court has nothing to follow. The dirt is inside the box. The trust holds the box.

I mean, that's it. That's the trick your estate attorney charges five figures to draw on a whiteboard.

Say a creditor gets past the trust. Say they reach the LLC interest itself. Arizona has an answer for that.

Sure. That's A.R.S. §29-3503(E). In plain English: the only thing a creditor can get is a charging order. That's a court order that lets them stand in line for distributions. That's all. A creditor with a charging order against an Arizona LLC can't force a distribution. Can't manage the LLC. Can't seize the land inside. They hold a piece of paper that pays them nothing until the LLC decides to pay. Arizona applies this to single-member LLCs too. No carve-out.

Creditor: Give me the rent checks.

LLC: Read the statute.

Creditor: Oh.

Right.

No structure is a magic shield. Section 548(e) of the Bankruptcy Code gives federal courts a 10-year lookback. Transfers into trusts you built for your own benefit. You move the cabin into the box last Tuesday because you see the IRS coming? That won't hold. The clock matters. The timing has to be clean.

Huckaby's trust held the deed. The deed pointed to the dirt. The dirt sat in California. California ignored the trust. Three sentences. That's the whole case.

The fix: the deed goes in the box. The box goes in the trust. The trust never touches the dirt.