The outcomes from 11 years of probate appeals, county by county, may help answer that key question of keen interest to counsel and their clients
Probate litigators live with a particular kind of uncertainty. The magistrate recommends, the probate judge adopts, and the loser files a notice of appeal. Then everyone waits to learn whether the court of appeals will leave the estate, the guardianship, or the adoption alone. Clients want to know the odds, and most attorneys answer from memory of our last few cases. We decided to count instead.
We pulled every probate-division appeal that Ohio’s 12 district courts of appeals decided on the merits from January 2015 through September 2026: 838 decisions reviewing judgments from probate courts in 86 counties. We identified the court of origin from each opinion’s caption and opening paragraph rather than from the subject matter. That means an estate lawsuit litigated in a general division is out, and a civil commitment or appropriation case heard by a probate judge is in. We read the operative judgment line of each opinion and sorted every case into one of three outcomes: affirmed, affirmed in part and reversed in part, or reversed. Then we asked the obvious questions: How often does probate judgment get disturbed? Does it matter which county it came from? And how do appellate outcomes in probate matters compare with the rest of the civil docket?
The short version: probate judgments survive appeal about three times in four; better than any other civil docket we track. When a probate judgment does fall, it usually falls entirely, and the odds roughly double depending on the district.
Headline numbers
Two things stand out.
First, fewer than one in four probate appellants obtained at least some relief. The 95% confidence interval runs from about 21% to 26%, so the estimate is tight.
Second, probate reversals tend to be all-or-nothing. Full reversals outnumber split decisions 3 to 1 (146 to 51). That makes sense given what probate courts decide. Whether a parent’s consent to an adoption is required, whether a will was lost or revoked, and whether a guardian should have been appointed are single, binary questions. When the appellate court disagrees with one of them, there is usually nothing left to affirm. Contract and domestic relations appeals, by contrast, split close to evenly between full and partial reversals, because those judgments bundle many severable rulings (damages, fees, property division, support).
How probate compares with the rest of the docket
Over the same period, here is how probate stacks up against the other major case types in the same database:
| Case type | Merit decisions | Reversed | Aff.in part/rev. in part | Any reversal |
| Contract | 1,699 | 18.1% | 16.1% | 34.2% |
| Insurance | 312 | 21.8% | 12.2% | 34.0% |
| Civil procedure | 2,941 | 25.7% | 7.0% | 32.7% |
| Real property | 1,614 | 20.6% | 8.4% | 29.0% |
| Domestic relations | 2,862 | 13.9% | 14.4% | 28.3% |
| Tort | 1,675 | 16.5% | 11.0% | 27.5% |
| Administrative | 2,324 | 21.3% | 6.0% | 27.4% |
| Probate | 838 | 17.4% | 6.1% | 23.5% |
| Criminal | 24,991 | 12.7% | 8.1% | 20.8% |
| Juvenile | 4,051 | 11.9% | 3.3% | 15.2% |
Probate has the lowest reversal rate of any civil docket type we track. Only criminal and juvenile appeals fare worse for appellants. Part of the explanation is the standard of review. Much of probate practice comes to the court of appeals on abuse of discretion or manifest weight review: guardianship appointments, fiduciary removals, fee approvals, and justifiable-cause findings in adoptions. Those standards are hard to overcome.
District-by-district breakdown
| District (seat) | Merit decisions | Affirmed | Aff. in part/rev. in part | Reversed | Any reversal |
| 1st (Cincinnati) | 25 | 20 | 3 | 2 | 20.0% |
| 2nd (Dayton) | 96 | 67 | 8 | 21 | 30.2% |
| 3rd (Lima) | 62 | 51 | 3 | 8 | 17.7% |
| 4th (Chillicothe) | 40 | 34 | 2 | 4 | 15.0% |
| 5th (Canton) | 138 | 115 | 6 | 17 | 16.7% |
| 6th (Toledo) | 63 | 44 | 7 | 12 | 30.2% |
| 7th (Youngstown) | 54 | 38 | 2 | 14 | 29.6% |
| 8th (Cleveland) | 86 | 68 | 4 | 14 | 20.9% |
| 9th (Akron) | 82 | 59 | 6 | 17 | 28.0% |
| 10th (Columbus) | 59 | 50 | 1 | 8 | 15.3% |
| 11th (Warren) | 56 | 39 | 3 | 14 | 30.4% |
| 12th (Middletown) | 77 | 56 | 6 | 15 | 27.3% |
The districts are split into two groups. The Eleventh (30.4%), Second and Sixth (30.2% each), Seventh (29.6%), Ninth (28.0%), and Twelfth (27.3%) disturb roughly three in ten probate judgments. The Fourth (15.0%), Tenth (15.3%), Fifth (16.7%), and Third (17.7%) disturb about one in six. The First and Eighth sit near 20%.
The Tenth and Fifth Districts are the friendliest to probate judges. The Tenth District disturbed just 15.3% of Franklin County probate judgments, and it issued only one split decision in eleven years. The Fifth District, which decides more probate appeals than any other district (138), reversed in whole or in part only 16.7% of the time.
County by county
The table below lists every county with at least 10 probate merit decisions, sorted by reversal rate. The rightmost column gives the 95% confidence interval. Read it before drawing conclusions: a county with 14 decisions can post a 50% rate and still carry an interval that reaches down to 27%.
| County (district) | Merit decisions | Affirmed | Aff. in part/rev. in part | Reversed | Any reversal | 95% range |
| Clinton (12th) | 14 | 7 | 0 | 7 | 50.0% | 27-73% |
| Belmont (7th) | 11 | 7 | 1 | 3 | 36.4% | 15-65% |
| Montgomery (2nd) | 53 | 35 | 6 | 12 | 34.0% | 23-47% |
| Summit (9th) | 39 | 26 | 3 | 10 | 33.3% | 21-49% |
| Lucas (6th) | 22 | 15 | 2 | 5 | 31.8% | 16-53% |
| Clark (2nd) | 13 | 9 | 0 | 4 | 30.8% | 13-58% |
| Wayne (9th) | 10 | 7 | 1 | 2 | 30.0% | 11-60% |
| Wood (6th) | 10 | 7 | 3 | 0 | 30.0% | 11-60% |
| Mahoning (7th) | 23 | 17 | 1 | 5 | 26.1% | 13-46% |
| Lorain (9th) | 21 | 16 | 1 | 4 | 23.8% | 11-45% |
| Warren (12th) | 17 | 13 | 3 | 1 | 23.5% | 10-47% |
| Trumbull (11th) | 26 | 20 | 1 | 5 | 23.1% | 11-42% |
| Cuyahoga (8th) | 86 | 68 | 4 | 14 | 20.9% | 14-31% |
| Hamilton (1st) | 25 | 20 | 3 | 2 | 20.0% | 9-39% |
| Butler (12th) | 20 | 16 | 1 | 3 | 20.0% | 8-42% |
| Clermont (12th) | 10 | 8 | 0 | 2 | 20.0% | 6-51% |
| Licking (5th) | 15 | 12 | 3 | 0 | 20.0% | 7-45% |
| Lake (11th) | 10 | 8 | 1 | 1 | 20.0% | 6-51% |
| Stark (5th) | 36 | 29 | 1 | 6 | 19.4% | 10-35% |
| Medina (9th) | 12 | 10 | 1 | 1 | 16.7% | 5-45% |
| Tuscarawas (5th) | 19 | 16 | 0 | 3 | 15.8% | 6-38% |
| Franklin (10th) | 59 | 50 | 1 | 8 | 15.3% | 8-27% |
| Delaware (5th) | 11 | 10 | 0 | 1 | 9.1% | 2-38% |
The remaining 62 counties produced 265 probate merit decisions combined, with a collective reversal rate of 22.6%, close to the statewide figure. Two counties, Pike and Putnam, produced no probate-court appeals in our database at all.
A few patterns hold up despite the small samples:
- Among the high-volume courts, Montgomery and Summit stand apart from Franklin. Montgomery (34.0%) and Summit (33.3%) were disturbed at more than twice Franklin’s rate (15.3%). Montgomery’s interval (23–47%) and Franklin’s (8–27%) overlap only slightly, so the gap is unlikely to be noise.
- Cuyahoga runs a little below average. The largest probate appellate docket in Ohio (86 decisions) came in at 20.9%, slightly under the statewide mean.
- Clinton County is the outlier. Half of its 14 probate merit decisions were reversed, every one of them in full.
- Several smaller courts had no reversals at all. Shelby (9 decisions), Greene (8), Huron (8), Fairfield (7), Knox (7), Muskingum (6), and Scioto (5) each went the full eleven years without a single probate judgment reversed in whole or in part.
- Split decisions cluster in a few places. Montgomery (6), Cuyahoga (4), and Summit, Warren, Hamilton, Wood, and Licking (3 each) account for about half of all partial reversals. Tuscarawas (19 decisions) never saw one, and Stark (36) saw only one.
What kind of probate case matters
We also sorted the probate appeals by subject, using the case caption, statute citations (R.C. Chapters 3107, 2717, 2111, 2107, and 5801–5811), and key terms in each opinion. The sort is approximate, but the differences are instructive:
| Probate matter | Merit decisions | Aff. in part/rev. in part | Reversed | Any reversal |
| Adoption | 275 | 8 | 50 | 21.1% |
| Name changes | 35 | 0 | 8 | 22.9% |
| Guardianship | 135 | 9 | 22 | 23.0% |
| Estate administration | 160 | 14 | 24 | 23.8% |
| Will contests and will validity | 114 | 12 | 17 | 25.4% |
| Trusts | 96 | 8 | 19 | 28.1% |
| Civil commitments | 7 | 0 | 0 | 0.0% |
| Appropriations and other public-body matters | 8 | 0 | 4 | 50.0% |
Adoption appeals are the largest and most durable category. About nine in ten turn on whether a parent’s consent is required, and nearly half involve a stepparent. Adoption judgments were disturbed only 21.2% of the time, and almost never in part (8 of 275). The consent question is yes-or-no, and the probate court’s findings on failure to communicate or support, and on justifiable cause, receive substantial deference.
Trust disputes and will contests are the most vulnerable, and the most likely to split. Will-validity cases were reversed in part in about 10% of decisions, well above the 6.1% probate average. These cases often reach the court of appeals on summary judgment or on questions of instrument construction, which get de novo review, and they tend to bundle several claims that can be separated.
Probate judges hear more than estates. Appeals from civil commitments, appropriation proceedings, park-district and sewer-project petitions, and the occasional disinterment also come out of probate courts. The samples are too small for rates, but every civil commitment appeal in the period was affirmed.
What this means for your practice
For the appellee defending a probate judgment, the baseline is favorable: three in four probate judgments survive intact. That is better than the survival rate in every other civil case type we track. It is best in the Fourth, Tenth, and Fifth Districts and in adoption cases. It is less favorable in the Eleventh, Second, Sixth, and Seventh Districts and in trust and will litigation.
For the appellant, the all-or-nothing pattern is the actionable signal. A probate appeal rarely produces a negotiated middle ground from the court of appeals; the judgment usually either stands or falls. That favors concentrating the brief on the single strongest dispositive error, particularly one that draws de novo review, rather than spreading the argument across every discretionary ruling in the record.
For everyone, remember what these figures exclude. They count only merit decisions. We set aside 68 probate appeals that were dismissed or otherwise decided without reaching the merits, most often for lack of a final, appealable order, a recurring problem with interlocutory probate entries under R.C. 2505.02. We also excluded original actions against probate judges (mandamus, prohibition, procedendo), which are not appeals at all. The dismissal count is its own lesson. An appeal from a probate entry that does not finally resolve the estate or claim is a real risk.
At the Supreme Court of Ohio, probate cases are rare. The court decided only about a dozen probate cases on the merits in the same period, too few to support a rate. For nearly every probate litigant, the court of appeals is the court of last resort.
Year over year
The probate reversal rate shows no trend. It ranged from 16.7% (2022) to 32.7% (2021) with no consistent direction. The 2026 figure through mid-September is 20.4% across 49 decisions, though the year is not complete.
A methodology note
These figures come from our internal database of Ohio appellate decisions (Jan. 2, 2015 through September 2026). A case counts as a probate-court appeal if its caption, its “appeal from” line, its trial-court case number, or its opening paragraph identifies a probate court or a common pleas court’s probate division as the trial court. Appeals from combined divisions (for example, a Probate/Juvenile or Domestic Relations/Juvenile/Probate Division) count only when the matter was one of probate jurisdiction, such adoption, estate, or guardianship. Custody, dependency, and protection-order cases from those combined courts are excluded. Original actions against probate judges are also excluded. Each decision is attributed to the county of the probate court whose judgment was reviewed.
We machine classified every outcome by reading the operative judgment line of the opinion, cross-checked by two independent parsers, and resolved every disagreement by hand. “Affirmed” includes judgments affirmed and remanded for ministerial correction. “Affirmed in part, reversed in part” includes judgments reversed only in part, vacated in part, or affirmed as modified. “Reversed” includes reversals, vacaturs, and reversals with remand. The denominator is merit decisions only; dismissals and original actions are excluded. Confidence intervals are 95% Wilson intervals. The case-type breakdown relies on keyword and statute matching and should be treated as approximate. Per-county samples are small.
This post is provided for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice.