What's an 'Excessive' Fee? Courts Leave It to Funds to Decide

Imagine you're on your deathbed, worried about whether the family trust you created will adequately provide for your spouse and your 12 children after you are gone. Your trustee proposes to add this provision about his fee to the trust:

To be found excessive, the trustee's fee must be so disproportionately large that it bears no reasonable relationship to the services rendered and could not have been the product of arm's-length bargaining.

Would you agree to these vague terms? I wouldn't, and neither would anyone in a group of about 50 fund-industry executives who were asked the same question at a recent conference.

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