When your legal fees are the same size as the entire estate you’re fighting over, you know something has gone wrong.
One of the enduring and recurring lessons that I have learned in my long career in estates law is that money makes people crazy. And it doesn’t have to be a huge sum.
For some heirs, even a small amount of money seems to trip a “crazy” switch – stripping them of any sense of reasonableness or decency. In my practice, I’ve seen too many otherwise-happy families torn apart by disagreements over the fate of a loved one’s assets.
That’s what seems to have happened in a recent Ontario court case, which the judge summed up in his opening line:
“This is a case that has so spiralled out of control that the parties have lost sight of the big picture. As this Decision will demonstrate, sometimes a party can be ‘right’ and still lose,” he wrote.
The family at the heart of the case were actually already engaged in litigation before their mother died in 2020 and the dispute only intensified in the following years, culminating in the replacement of three of her children as co-executors by a single independent lawyer.
By July 2025, the decision says that the estate trustee was ready to make a final distribution of the estate’s $27,000 residue – around $4,500 for each of the deceased’s six surviving children.
However, during a meeting at the lawyer’s office, one of the siblings took issue with the executor’s handling of the estate, questioning a number of disbursements (which the judge notes would have been divided six ways for a total cost to the beneficiaries of $35.67 each.)
The decision says the beneficiary refused to sign a final release without making her own amendments and that the meeting descended to the point where the police attended after the lawyer complained that she was trespassing (no charges were ultimately laid).
Things only escalated from there, with the estate trustee launching his own application in an attempt to pay out the other beneficiaries, with the final sister’s portion to be paid into court.
The judge ultimately ruled against the executor, finding that he had made his application under the wrong rules. However, the judge still awarded costs against the beneficiary, concluding that her behaviour was “entirely to blame for the legal fees that have been incurred.”
“One of the express purposes of costs awards is to discourage unreasonable conduct in litigation,” the judge concluded, ordering her to pay the executor personally $27,000.
There may not have been any way to avoid court in this case, but there is hope for most families who want to minimize the chances of their own costly estate battle.
Most of these disputes are fed by emotions rather than hard figures, so testators should try to nip issues in the bud by giving beneficiaries an idea of what they can expect from a will ahead of time. Even if it’s less than they had hoped, setting realistic expectations ahead of time will take a lot of the heat out of the situation when estate administration begins.
The most likely estates to be contested are those left by a person with no will at all, a risk that around half of adult Canadians are currently taking.
While thinking or talking about your own death will never be much fun, your friends and family will definitely thank you for having an estate plan in place if it saves them the hassle of dealing with an intestacy at an already emotionally difficult time.
When someone dies without a will in Ontario, the government effectively decides what will happen to their property – via the province’s Succession Law Reform Act, which sets strict rules for the distribution of assets.
But the Act makes no provision for the individual circumstances of the deceased, which can lead to issues, especially for those with anything but a conventional family arrangement.
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