Roosevelt County, NM Probate Information

Work out what the estate holds before you contact the court. Which route fits, and which of the two Roosevelt County forums you use, depends on whether there is a will, who is entitled to be appointed, whether anyone is likely to object, and what kind of property is involved. Some estates here never need a court at all, because the property passes by survivorship, by a recorded transfer on death deed, by a payable on death designation or by a beneficiary designation, and some qualify for one of New Mexico's affidavit routes that are handled at a bank or at the County Clerk's recording counter rather than in a courtroom. Those statewide routes and their dollar limits are covered on the New Mexico state page. Sorting it out first matters here because neither forum has e-filing for a self-represented filer, there is no online docket to check for a probate court case, and the county's guidance is to speak to the probate judge before anything is filed.

Then list every asset and every debt in detail. New Mexico requires the application for informal probate to be verified as accurate and complete (NMSA 1978, Section 45-3-301), and by verifying it you submit personally to the court's jurisdiction in any later proceeding for fraud or perjury, so a missed account is not a small thing. Within three months of appointment the personal representative must prepare an inventory of everything the person owned at death, with a value for each item as of the date of death (Section 45-3-706), which the county's own probate page repeats. In a farming and dairy county that list often runs past the bank accounts to equipment, livestock, leases, water rights and mineral interests. Sunset's asset discovery work, searching more than 2,300 financial institutions, exists for exactly this step, so the application you take to Portales describes the estate accurately the first time.

New Mexico probate is filed in the county where the person lived at the time of death (NMSA 1978, Section 45-3-201(A)(1)). If the person was not a New Mexico resident, it is filed in any New Mexico county where they owned property at the time of death (Section 45-3-201(A)(2)). Within Roosevelt County you have a choice of court: the Roosevelt County Probate Court for an informal, uncontested probate, or the Ninth Judicial District Court for anything formal or contested (Sections 45-1-302 and 45-1-302.1). Where a proceeding could be brought in more than one place, the court where it is first commenced has the exclusive right to proceed (Section 45-1-303(A)).

The Roosevelt County Probate Court sits at 109 W. First Street in Portales, the county seat, and serves the whole county: Portales itself, Elida, Dora, Floyd, Causey, Milnesand, Arch and the dairy, farm and ranch country between them. It is a county office within New Mexico's judicial branch, funded by the county (NMSA 1978, Section 34-7-4), and the position of probate judge is a part-time, elected one (Sections 34-7-1 and 34-7-2). Its clerk is the Roosevelt County Clerk, because the county clerk of each county is designated as the clerk of the probate court in that county (Section 34-7-22(A)), and Roosevelt County says so in its own words: the Clerk's office also serves as the County Clerk of the Probate Court. The county's instruction to a family is equally plain, on the Clerk's own probates page: the County Clerk works with the probate judge in filing informal probates, and the probate judge is the first one to contact when settling an estate.

The Ninth Judicial District Court covers Curry and Roosevelt Counties. A multi-county district is an administrative fact rather than a venue rule, and several New Mexico districts have a courthouse in the smaller county that takes no filings and routes everything to a main clerk elsewhere. The Ninth is not one of them. It publishes a staffed Roosevelt County District Court at 109 W. First St. in Portales, open 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday, with its own fax and its own phone tree whose option 5 is Civil or Probate, alongside a staffed Curry County District Court in Clovis. Its records page confirms the same thing from the other direction: court case records may be inspected in person at the clerk's office at the courthouse where the case was filed. So a formal or contested Roosevelt County estate is filed at a counter in Portales, in the same building as the probate court.

Two things follow from the shared building. The first is convenience: if the probate judge declines an informal application, or if a matter has to move up, the district court counter is in the same courthouse rather than an hour away. The second is that you have to say which court you are looking for when you arrive and on the envelope when you post something, because the county publishes no floor or room number for either office and the two are different courts with different fees and different rules. One other Portales courthouse is not the place for an estate at all: the Roosevelt County Magistrate Court, at 1630 N. Boston Ave. on (575) 356-8569, is a court of limited jurisdiction with no probate jurisdiction.

Both courts are in the same building, and that is worth saying out loud. The Roosevelt County Probate Court and the Roosevelt County District Court are both at 109 W. First Street in Portales, the Roosevelt County Courthouse. Directories that give a small county's two courts the same address are often carrying a copy-paste error, and on the neighboring Curry County page the same shape turned out to be one, but here both offices publish that address themselves and it is correct. What the county does not publish is a floor or a room number for either one. The only interior markers it publishes are mail boxes and one floor: the County Clerk is Lobby Box 4, the Treasurer is Lobby Box 3 and county Administration is on the third floor. So address an envelope to the court you actually mean, and say which court you want when you walk in.

The probate court publishes no hours, and the county's answer to that is a telephone call rather than a counter. New Mexico makes the position of probate judge a part-time one (NMSA 1978, Section 34-7-1(B)) and provides that the probate court is open at such times as the clerk of the probate court determines and publishes on the county's website (Section 34-7-8). Roosevelt County publishes no such times anywhere. What it publishes instead is an instruction: the County Clerk works with the probate judge in filing informal probates, and the probate judge is the first one to contact when settling an estate, on (575) 760-3960. The county's own courthouse office hours, published for its administrative departments and its Clerk, are 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., Monday through Friday. Treat those as the county building's hours rather than the court's, and call before you drive in from Elida, Dora, Floyd or Causey.

The County Clerk is the clerk of the probate court, and Roosevelt County says so in its own words: the Clerk's office also serves as the County Clerk of the Probate Court, which is exactly what Section 34-7-22(A) NMSA 1978 provides. That has three practical consequences. The Clerk is required to index and keep a record of probates filed in its office, so the Clerk's Office on (575) 356-8562 is where you ask what is on file. The Clerk provides certified copies of probated wills and of letters issued to personal representatives, so that is where the copies for the banks come from. And the Clerk sells the county's probate packets at $5.00 each.

One counter does the probate record and the deed recording, and the county has a recording rule that catches estates. The same Clerk's Office records deeds and affidavits, which is where a personal representative's deed lands after letters issue and where a surviving spouse of a community property homestead records the affidavit that avoids probate altogether six months after the death (Section 45-3-1205). Recording costs $25.00 per document for ten entries or less, and the county's published counting rule expressly treats a personal representative as a name with a vested interest, so a deed that recites the estate, the personal representative and the buyers can run to more entries than you expect. On top of that, an amendment to ordinance 97-2, passed by the county commissioners on August 1, 2000, requires any deed conveying real estate in an unincorporated area of Roosevelt County to include a Grantor's Affidavit before the Clerk will record it. Most of this county is unincorporated, so for farm and ranch ground that rule is the normal case rather than the exception. The county publishes the affidavit form.

The county's own probate guidance is useful and one part of it is out of date. The Probate Judge page carries a plain-language walk through claims against the estate, the inventory, distribution, the accounting and closing. Two parts of it match the statute exactly and are worth trusting: it says you are not required to file the inventory with the court but may if you wish and must give a copy to any interested person who requests it, which is Section 45-3-706, and it says the accounting need not be filed either, which reflects the fact that outside supervised administration New Mexico has no routine court accounting. But the closing section still says the estate can be closed once at least three months have passed since it was opened. That was the rule before 2016. Laws 2016, chapter 69, Section 720 changed it, and a verified closing statement can now be filed no earlier than six months after the original appointment of the personal representative (Section 45-3-1003(A)). Follow the statute, not the page.

Nothing about a Roosevelt County probate case is online, and one county search will mislead you. County probate court cases are not in any statewide system: the free statewide Case Lookup tool offers District, Magistrate, Metropolitan and Municipal as its court types and has no probate court option, and no probate court appears in the New Mexico Courts locator either. Roosevelt County publishes no probate index of its own. The County Clerk does publish an online Self Service records search, but it is the Clerk's index of recorded land documents, and its own disclaimer describes it as similar to a library card catalogue and tells users to visit or call the Clerk's office for official copies. Finding nothing there tells you nothing about whether a probate case exists. A Ninth Judicial District Court case is different: it appears in Case Lookup as an index entry with no documents, and the case file itself can be inspected in person at the clerk's office in the courthouse where it was filed.

Probate has its own option on the district court's phone tree, and the Portales counter is staffed. Calling (575) 359-6920 and choosing option 1, then option 1, then 5 reaches Civil or Probate. That matters because several New Mexico multi-county districts have a courthouse in the smaller county that takes no filings at all; the Ninth publishes hours, a fax and a full phone menu for Portales, so a Roosevelt County formal probate is filed in Roosevelt County. Use the number the district itself publishes: older county documents circulate a different district court number.

Most Roosevelt County estates are uncontested, and both of the county's forums are set up for families doing this themselves: an informal probate is decided on the papers for $30.00 (NMSA 1978, Section 34-7-14) with no hearing, and the county tells you to start with a telephone call to the probate judge. Neither office can advise you, though. The Ninth Judicial District says it in terms to self-represented filers: you must follow the same rules a lawyer must follow, courthouse staff are prohibited from giving legal advice, and clerks may not tell you how to proceed. Court staff in both forums are bound by the same rule (Rule 23-113 NMRA). Consider counsel when a will is likely to be contested or the heirs disagree, when someone outside the family claims an interest in farm or dairy ground, water rights, grazing leases or mineral interests, when the estate is insolvent or a creditor is pressing, when a personal representative's deed or a sale has to be drafted (the courts' own guide warns that deeds can be tricky to draft and execute properly, and here the county's recording ordinance adds a Grantor's Affidavit for land outside the towns), when property or a business sits across the state line in Texas, when heirs cannot be located, when a guardianship or conservatorship has to run alongside the estate, or whenever the matter has to move to the Ninth Judicial District Court, which is the only forum that can decide any of it. Sunset can connect families to a vetted New Mexico probate attorney serving Roosevelt County.

Find the accounts and assets. During estate settlement, Sunset searches more than 2,300 financial institutions and public records to surface bank and credit union accounts, retirement plans, brokerage holdings, life insurance, Roosevelt County real property and unclaimed property, so you know what the estate holds before you file. New Mexico requires the application for informal probate to be verified as accurate and complete (NMSA 1978, Section 45-3-301), and requires an inventory with date of death values within three months of appointment (Section 45-3-706).

Generate the probate packet. Sunset assembles the paperwork for your route, whether an informal application on Form 4B-302 or Form 4B-301 NMRA or one of New Mexico's affidavit routes, ready to take to the courthouse at 109 W. First Street in Portales or to post there.

Find a local probate attorney. When a matter is contested, when title is disputed, or when it otherwise has to go to the Ninth Judicial District Court, Sunset connects families to a vetted New Mexico probate attorney serving Roosevelt County.

Sunset is free for families. Revenue comes from bank partners that pay Sunset while estate funds sit in an FDIC-insured estate account ($3M coverage).