Most people assume a divorce decree or marriage certificate rewrites whatever estate plan they already have. The paperwork feels official. The life change was real and legally documented. What more could be required?
Nevada law does revoke some provisions automatically when your family situation changes, but it leaves others exactly as you wrote them. Sometimes consequences don’t surface until years later, when a family is already grieving. Knowing which rules apply to which documents, and where the exceptions are, is what actually protects the people you intend to protect. At Leavitt Law Firm, we’ve been serving Las Vegas families since 1989, and our estate planning practice lets us look at both sides of a life change: the family court record and the estate documents that need to reflect it.
What Nevada Law Automatically Changes (and What It Doesn’t)
Nevada has two statutes that do real work when a marriage ends. NRS 133.115 automatically revokes any devise, beneficial interest, or personal representative designation in a will made in favor of a former spouse, once the divorce or annulment is final. NRS 111.781 goes further, revoking revocable beneficiary designations, powers of appointment, and fiduciary nominations favoring a former spouse in nonprobate transfer instruments. A nonprobate transfer is any asset that passes by contract or title rather than through a will, such as accounts with named beneficiaries or jointly held property. NRS 111.781 also converts a joint tenancy or community property with right of survivorship into equal tenancies in common between the former spouses.
These are meaningful protections. But they do exactly one thing: remove a former spouse from documents that already exist. They don’t add a new spouse. They don’t add a child born after the divorce. They don’t retitle a house into a trust or substitute a new executor for the one your old will named. The plan you had before your life changed is still the plan, with your former spouse erased from it, until you replace it with something intentional.
The Exceptions Nevada Residents Often Miss
The automatic revocation rules in NRS 111.781 have a significant carve-out most people don’t know about. Federal law can preempt the state statute entirely for certain retirement accounts. If your 401(k) or other ERISA-governed retirement plan still lists your former spouse as beneficiary, NRS 111.781 may not remove them. Federal ERISA preemption keeps those accounts payable to whoever is named on the beneficiary form on file with the plan administrator. The only fix is filing a new beneficiary designation directly with the plan. A divorce decree, standing alone, doesn’t accomplish that.
There’s also an exception within NRS 133.115 itself. If a court-approved property settlement agreement or a specific court order expressly preserves a former spouse’s rights under an old will, the automatic revocation doesn’t apply. The decree’s own language controls. For Clark County residents, divorce decrees are entered through the Family Division of the Eighth Judicial District Court, and the property settlement agreement becomes part of that court record. Any estate plan review after a Las Vegas divorce needs to account for what that agreement actually says before assuming the revocation statutes did their job.
Marriage, New Children, & Nevada’s Community Property Rules
Remarriage creates its own set of questions. Under NRS 133.110, a will is revoked as to a new spouse when someone marries after making the will and the spouse survives them, unless the will or a marriage contract already accounts for the spouse, or the spouse is otherwise provided for through a transfer outside the will. That revocation protects a new spouse from being entirely cut out, but it doesn’t replace a full, updated estate plan.
Nevada’s community property rules change what a will or trust actually needs to accomplish for a surviving spouse. Under NRS 123.250, a surviving spouse already receives an automatic undivided one-half interest in community property outright. Only the decedent’s remaining half is subject to the will. This is meaningfully different from common-law states, where a will may need to do much more work to provide for a spouse. A trust or will drafted in another state before a move to Nevada may not reflect this correctly.
Children add another layer of complexity. Nevada law draws a sharp distinction between two situations:
- Child born after the will was signed: NRS 133.160 protects that child with an intestate share, which is the share they would have received if there had been no will at all.
- Child already living when the will was signed but not mentioned in it: NRS 133.170 presumes the omission was intentional. That child may receive nothing, regardless of what a parent would have wanted.
An older will that simply never mentions a child who was alive when it was drafted carries real risk under NRS 133.170. If your family has grown since you last looked at your documents, this distinction matters.
Relocation & Financial Changes That Signal a Review
Moving to Nevada from another state is itself a reason to review an estate plan, even if nothing else in your family changed. A will or trust drafted under another state’s rules may rely on spousal rights, community property assumptions, or tax structures that work differently here. A document valid in another state is generally still valid in Nevada, but it may not accomplish what you originally intended.
Real property in Nevada creates its own considerations. A Deed Upon Death, authorized under NRS 111.655 to 111.699, allows real property to pass outside probate directly to a named beneficiary. Only the most recently recorded deed controls. If you recorded a Deed Upon Death years ago naming a beneficiary who is no longer the right choice, that deed stays in effect until a new one is recorded with the county recorder where the property is located. Filing a new beneficiary designation elsewhere doesn’t affect it.
Trusts have a related problem. A revocable living trust only controls what’s actually in it. Real estate purchased after a trust was signed, a new business interest, or a financial account opened after the trust was created still passes through probate unless it’s formally retitled into the trust’s name. The trust document itself may be perfectly current while key assets sit outside it.
Turning These Rules into an Updated Plan
A post-life-event review doesn’t always mean rewriting every document from scratch. It means comparing what you have against the specific Nevada statute that governs the change you’ve been through. A divorce requires checking the property settlement agreement against both NRS 133.115 and NRS 111.781, verifying that every ERISA-governed retirement account has a current beneficiary form on file, and confirming who now serves as executor, trustee, and agent under any durable power of attorney. That is the document that names someone to make financial or legal decisions on your behalf if you can’t. Remarriage or a new child requires checking whether community property is properly accounted for, whether the correct children are named, and whether any older omission could trigger a pretermitted heir claim under NRS 133.170.
The habit worth building is this: match each life event to the specific rule that governs it, check each document type separately, and don’t assume that because one thing was handled automatically, the rest followed. Estate plans are made of multiple documents, and Nevada law touches each one differently.
Because our practice covers both Nevada family law and estate planning, we can review how a divorce decree’s trust administration obligations interact with your existing documents, or how a recent marriage or new child changes what your current plan actually accomplishes. If a major life change has you wondering whether your estate plan still reflects your intentions, we’re here to help. Reach us at (702) 996-6052.