His final published work, The Laws of the Province of South Carolina (1736), chronicled the early legal and judicial history of Charleston up until 1719.
His criticism of Joseph Blake, who had succeeded the previous governor John Archdale in 1696, resulted in Trott's arrest and removal from office.
Trott, along with his brother-in-law William Rhett, both had considerable support within the colonial assembly and resisted Craven's policy of tolerance.
By the time of his appointment as vice admiralty judge in 1716, he and Rhett controlled virtually all of the royal and proprietary offices in South Carolina.
In 1718, Trott gained a certain degree of notoriety when he served as Vice Admiralty Judge during the trial of Captain Stede Bonnet and his crew.
The main reasons for replacing the proprietary government was their perceived failure to protect the colony from Indian raiding parties.
The English government agreed to provide the colony with adequate protection and sent Francis Nicholson to act as royal governor.
His works included, aside from his own memoirs of the Bonnet trial, a lexicon of the psalms Clavis Linguae Sanctae (1719) and The Laws of the British Plantations (1721).
He spent the last years of his life, according to personal correspondence and his later obituary from the South Carolina Gazette, explicating the Hebrew text of the Bible which has apparently been lost.
He left small bequests to his "two grandchildren Sarah and Mary Jane Rhett", descendants of his second wife by her first marriage, but apparently had no children of his own.
Aside from his involvement in the colonial assembly with William Rhett, Trott made important contributions to the legal development of South Carolina.