Why the losing side did not have to pay Marc-Andre's legal bill

The situation

‘I keep getting told to wait for the court, but nobody can tell me how long that actually means.’ Marc-Andre said this in our first meeting with the particular frustration of someone who had already been waiting for months and had no idea whether he was three weeks or eight months from an answer. He worked as a pharmacy technician in North Bay, single, careful with money, and not someone who had ever expected to be sitting across a desk describing a dispute with his own cousin.

The dispute traced back to his uncle Dragan, who had died a little over a year earlier leaving an estate worth somewhere between $300,000 and $600,000. Dragan's will had been drafted years before his death, not by a lawyer familiar with careful estate language but in a do-it-yourself style that left one key clause genuinely unclear. It described how a portion of the estate should be divided between Marc-Andre and his cousin Luc, a landscaper who had been close to Dragan in his final years, but the wording could reasonably be read two different ways, one that favoured Marc-Andre and one that favoured Luc.

Neither cousin had drafted the ambiguity, and neither had done anything wrong. They simply read the same sentence and arrived at opposite, both defensible, conclusions about what their uncle had meant. What made the situation urgent, beyond the dispute itself, was a delay entirely outside anyone's control: the probate registry handling the file was working through a significant backlog, and every step that needed a court's stamp or a registry's processing took far longer than either cousin had budgeted for emotionally or financially. Marc-Andre's modest income meant every month of delay was a month of legal costs accumulating with no resolution in sight, and he came to us not just wanting to win the interpretation argument but needing some certainty about when, and how, this would actually end.

By the time the file reached a point where a court would rule on the interpretation question, both cousins had spent well over a year in a state of limbo, unable to finalize the estate, unable to move on, and increasingly aware that even winning the underlying argument might not fully make up for what the process itself had already cost.

What made this urgent

Two things made this file urgent in ways that are worth separating, because they called for different responses. The first was the interpretation dispute itself: a genuinely ambiguous clause in a will is not something that resolves on its own, and until a court either interprets the disputed wording or the parties agree on a reading between themselves, an estate cannot be finally distributed. Every asset sits frozen while cousins who used to get along civilly argue over a sentence their uncle wrote without legal help. The house could not be sold, the investment accounts could not be closed out, and neither cousin could tell anyone, including themselves, when any of that would change.

The second, and the one that pushed hardest on the calendar, was the registry backlog. The court and probate offices handling the file were significantly behind on processing, a systemic delay affecting far more estates than just this one, and it meant that steps which would ordinarily take weeks were taking months. Filing a motion to have the court interpret the ambiguous clause required first waiting for basic administrative steps in the estate to clear the registry queue, and each of those steps had its own wait attached.

This combination is what made the file feel, to Marc-Andre, like it was moving at two different speeds: the legal argument itself was not especially complicated once properly framed, but the process around it crawled. We explained early on that this was not a sign anything had gone wrong with his case specifically, and not something either side could accelerate through more aggressive litigation. Pushing harder against a backlog does not move it faster; it mainly adds cost.

The urgency also had a financial dimension unique to Marc-Andre's situation. As a pharmacy technician with a modest, steady income, he did not have deep reserves to fund a prolonged dispute, and the not-uncommon assumption that estate litigation costs get sorted out neatly once a decision comes down was not something he could simply rely on and hope for the best. He needed to understand, going in, what would happen to the legal bills regardless of which way the interpretation question ultimately went, because that answer would shape how hard he could afford to push and for how long. Without that answer, the risk was not just losing the interpretation argument, but winning it and still coming out behind once his own legal bill was subtracted from whatever share he received.

What we did

1. Assessed the ambiguity honestly before advising a position. Rather than telling Marc-Andre his reading was obviously correct, we reviewed the disputed clause carefully and confirmed that Luc's competing interpretation was genuinely reasonable too, which shaped how we approached both the interpretation argument and, later, the costs question. Overselling the strength of his position at the outset would only have made a fair costs argument harder to make later.
2. Filed to bring the interpretation question before the court. Because the cousins could not resolve the reading between themselves, and further conversation between them had only hardened both positions, we brought the ambiguous clause before the court for a formal interpretation, the only mechanism that could produce a binding answer both sides would have to accept rather than another round of informal back-and-forth that risked going nowhere.
3. Managed the registry delay actively. We tracked the file's status through the backlog, filed everything as early and cleanly as possible to avoid being sent back for corrections, which would have meant rejoining the queue, and kept Marc-Andre informed about realistic timeframes rather than letting him assume the worst about his own case's progress. A single rejected filing at this registry could easily have added another two or three months to an already slow process.
4. Built the interpretation argument around the will's own language and context. We focused the case on what Dragan's other, unambiguous provisions suggested about his intentions, using the clearer parts of the will to support the reading of the disputed clause that favoured Marc-Andre, rather than relying on speculation about what Dragan might have wanted. Anchoring the argument in the document itself, rather than in what either cousin remembered their uncle saying, gave the court something firmer to rely on than competing recollections.
5. Raised the costs question early, not after the ruling. Because the ambiguity was traceable to Dragan's own drafting rather than to any unreasonable conduct by either cousin, we argued from the outset that whichever side lost the interpretation question should not be personally liable for the other's costs, a position grounded in the principle that a testator's own unclear drafting is treated differently from a beneficiary's unreasonable litigation conduct.
6. Kept Marc-Andre's conduct in the litigation clean. We advised him against any step that could later be characterized as unreasonable or aggressive, including impatient correspondence directed at the registry or at Luc, since the costs argument depended on both sides having acted in good faith throughout a dispute neither of them had created, and a single sharp email could have undone months of careful positioning.
7. Pressed for a costs ruling addressing both parties from the estate itself. Once the interpretation question was decided, we argued that legal costs on both sides should be paid from the estate rather than by either cousin personally, on the basis that Dragan's own ambiguous wording, not either beneficiary's behaviour, was what had made the dispute necessary in the first place. We supported that argument with the file's own record, showing neither side had taken an unreasonable step throughout.

The outcome

The court adopted the interpretation we had argued for, resolving the disputed clause in Marc-Andre's favour based on the context supplied by the rest of Dragan's will. Just as significantly, the court agreed that the ambiguity was the testator's doing, not either cousin's, and ordered that both sides' reasonable legal costs be paid out of the estate rather than by Marc-Andre or Luc personally. That meant Marc-Andre, despite having initiated the court process, was spared the risk that often accompanies estate litigation: winning the argument but still absorbing a large legal bill, or worse, being ordered to cover the other side's costs as well on top of his own. It was the outcome we had been building toward from the moment we raised the costs question, not something that fell into place on its own once the interpretation ruling came down.

The registry backlog did not disappear, and the file still took well over a year from Dragan's death to final resolution, a timeline shaped almost entirely by administrative delay rather than by how genuinely contested the legal question actually was. Marc-Andre found that frustrating throughout, and we did not pretend the delay was something we could simply solve through more filings or more pressure on the registry, because it was not.

What the costs ruling did accomplish was protect the outcome from being hollowed out by the very process that produced it. A win that costs more in legal fees than the disputed amount is not much of a win in practical terms, and having the estate absorb both sides' reasonable costs, rather than the losing party personally, meant Marc-Andre's eventual share of the estate arrived closer to what the will, properly read, actually intended for him. Luc, for his part, accepted the ruling without further appeal, and the two cousins were able to finalize the estate together once the legal questions were finally settled.

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