Art. 3121.Attorney Appointed As Administrator of Vacant Successions; Exceptions

A succession is vacant when nobody entitled to take charge of it has come forward, whether because no heir is known, none is available, or none is willing to accept the burden of administration. Left unattended, a vacant succession's property can deteriorate, go unmanaged, or be lost track of, so Louisiana provides a way to give it a representative regardless.

Article 3121 sets a three-month waiting period from the decedent's death. If no qualified person has petitioned for appointment as administrator by then, the court may appoint an attorney at law to fill that role and to set that attorney's compensation for doing so. Rather than letting the court pick a favorite, the article requires the attorney to be selected on a rotating basis from a list of attorneys currently practicing in the parish where the succession is to be opened, spreading these appointments evenly across the local bar.

Once appointed, the attorney is not treated as some special category of representative. The attorney must furnish security like any administrator, and every other provision of succession law governing an administrator applies with equal force. The one limit on this article is geographic: it does not apply in any parish where a public administrator has been appointed, because Article 3122 assigns that role to the public administrator instead.