In Florida, it's perfectly legal to rob an estate. All lawyers and bankers have to do is belly up to the trough our elected representatives built for them.

Estate lawyers and executors do important work when they transfer wealth between generations, and they deserve a reasonable fee. For years, "reasonable" was defined as a percentage of an estate. But in 1991, the Florida Supreme Court scrapped that practice, which overpays those who handle large but simple estates. The court ruled that estate managers should simply charge for the time worked.

The bankers who often serve as estate administrators didn't like that. Nor did the lawyers. They argued that billing strictly by the hour encourages unethical professionals to pad their time sheets and discourages good ones from working efficiently.

Those are valid points, but they don't justify what happened next. Under pressure from the Florida Bar and Florida Bankers Association, legislators last year handed estate professionals a license to steal. Consider how the new pay law could bleed a typical Florida estate, one worth $300,000:

• Under the old law, a $150-an-hour lawyer who worked 20 hours on the estate would collect $3,000. The new law says the lawyer can keep that money, plus charge 2 percent of the estate as a "reasonable" fee. That's an extra $6,000.
• The executor cleans up, too. Regardless of how much work was done, he pockets 3 percent of the estate, or $9,000. And if there's another executor -- who could easily be the estate lawyer -- the estate is out another $9,000 fee.
• Don't think a living trust will necessarily avoid this penalty. Lawyers can now take a 1 percent cut of assets that bypass probate in large trusts.

Heirs can save money by negotiating a lower fee or challenging an excessive one in court. But the new law burdens them with proving the fee is "unreasonable." Many heirs -- particularly ones who are drowning in grief, live out-of-state, or can't afford a lawyer -- are not going to challenge fees. Greedy estate professionals know that; they're banking on it.

While decent lawyers are not abusing the new law, unscrupulous ones are. As he considered fees in one Orange County case, Circuit Judge R. James Stroker called the law what it is:

An invitation to gouge. It's time for legislators to put the law where it belongs: in the trash.