Art. 3422.Court Costs; Compensation

Article 3422 supplies one of the practical payoffs of qualifying as a small succession under Article 3421: a built-in fee schedule designed to keep costs proportionate to a modest estate. It applies specifically to judicial proceedings under Title V, the Chapter 3 track that still involves a court, rather than to the affidavit procedure of Chapter 2, which bypasses a court filing and a succession representative altogether.

The first savings comes from court costs themselves, set at one-half of what similar proceedings would cost in a succession that does not qualify as small. That halving applies across the judicial small-succession proceeding generally, not to any single filing.

The second savings governs what a succession representative can earn for handling the estate: no more than five percent of the succession's gross assets. That flat percentage cap contrasts with the compensation approach for an ordinary succession representative under Article 3351, which is not tied to a fixed percentage in the same way. The tradeoff is deliberate: a representative handling a small succession accepts a capped, lower ceiling on compensation in exchange for administering an estate that Title V has already streamlined in other respects.