A Will Challenge in St. Thomas Settles at Mediation

The situation

Tomasz had run the family's small commercial rental business alongside his father for almost fifteen years before his father passed away. Between them, they owned four small commercial buildings in St. Thomas, leased out to a mix of local tenants, worth in total somewhere around $1.3 million. Under the father's will, Tomasz inherited the majority interest in the properties and was named executor — the person responsible for administering the estate, paying its debts, and distributing what remains to the beneficiaries. His sister Zofia, who had not worked in the business, received a smaller cash bequest along with a minority share in the properties.

Their sister Soo-jin, a surgeon who had moved away from St. Thomas for her career years earlier, received only a modest fixed sum. Soo-jin had visited their father less often in his final years, but she had spoken with him by phone regularly, and she believed the will did not reflect what he had actually wanted. About four months after the estate was opened, her lawyer served Tomasz with a notice that she intended to challenge the will's validity.

The legal problem

A will challenge asks the court to declare that a will is not valid, usually on one of two grounds: that the person who signed it lacked the mental capacity to understand what they were doing, or that someone exerted undue influence over them — pressure serious enough to override their own free judgment. Soo-jin's claim combined both. She argued their father's health had declined in his last year, that his memory had grown unreliable, and that Tomasz, who saw him daily through the business, had steered him toward a will that favoured Tomasz's role as the one who had "kept things running."

If a will challenge succeeds, the court can set the will aside entirely, sending the estate back to an earlier will if one exists, or to the default rules that apply when someone dies without a valid will, under Ontario's Succession Law Reform Act. For Tomasz and Zofia, that would have meant Soo-jin receiving a full equal share of the property portfolio rather than the fixed sum their father had chosen — a swing worth several hundred thousand dollars.

The estate's administration froze while the challenge was pending. Under Ontario's estate rules, an executor facing a validity challenge generally cannot finish distributing the estate's assets until the challenge is resolved, since doing so risks having to unwind the distribution later. Rent from the four buildings kept coming in, but nothing could be paid out to the beneficiaries, and the family's professional fees for defending the file were mounting against an estate that had otherwise been straightforward.

There was also a practical wrinkle specific to a working commercial portfolio. Tomasz needed to keep signing leases, arranging repairs, and dealing with tenants while the challenge was live, all in his capacity as executor. Every one of those decisions carried a background risk: if the will were eventually set aside, a court could later ask whether the executor had managed the properties appropriately in the meantime. That uncertainty made ordinary landlord decisions, like renewing a tenant's lease for another term, feel far riskier than they should have.

What we did

1. Assembled the capacity record first. Before responding to the claim, we gathered every document that spoke to the father's state of mind around the time he signed the will: his family doctor's clinical notes from that period, the notes kept by the lawyer who prepared the will, and a record of his continued, active involvement running the properties — signing leases, meeting tenants, and reviewing rent rolls — well after the date Soo-jin said his capacity had failed.
2. Obtained the will-drafting lawyer's file. Lawyers who prepare wills for older clients commonly take notes specifically aimed at capacity and independence, including whether the client met with them alone. Those notes recorded that the father had met the drafting lawyer without Tomasz present, had explained his reasoning for the unequal division in his own words, and had been advised to see his doctor for a capacity assessment beforehand, which he did.
3. Documented the estrangement honestly, without attacking Soo-jin. The father's own correspondence, including messages to a longtime family friend, showed he had made the decision to favour Tomasz's role in the business well before his health declined, and that he had told friends why. This mattered because it gave an innocent explanation for the will's terms that had nothing to do with pressure applied late in his life.
4. Prepared for, rather than resisted, estate mediation. Many estate disputes end up at mediation before trial, whether by court order or by agreement between the parties. Rather than treating this as a formality, we built the record specifically so that Soo-jin's team would see its strength before the parties ever reached a courtroom — sharing the medical and drafting-lawyer records in the lead-up to the mediation date.
5. Advised Tomasz on the cost of pushing forward versus settling. Even a strong capacity record does not guarantee a result at trial, and litigating a will challenge to judgment in the Superior Court typically takes well over a year and consumes a meaningful share of the estate's value in fees on both sides. We were candid with Tomasz and Zofia that a modest, early resolution could preserve far more of the estate for the family than a win obtained after a full trial.

The outcome

At mediation, Soo-jin's position weakened once her lawyer had reviewed the capacity record in full. The clinical notes, the independent meeting with the drafting lawyer, and the documented, contemporaneous explanation for the father's decision left little room for a credible undue influence argument, and her own recollection of "decline" did not match the medical timeline. Rather than proceed to a contested hearing on capacity — a fight she was increasingly unlikely to win — Soo-jin agreed to withdraw the challenge.

The settlement upheld the will as written. In exchange for a full and final release, the estate paid Soo-jin a modest additional amount, roughly $45,000 above her original bequest, funded from estate assets before the balance was divided between Tomasz and Zofia as the will directed. That figure reflected the real cost of a trial the estate would likely have won but did not want to pay for in time, legal fees, and family strain. The properties, worth in total about $1.3 million, were distributed on the schedule the father had set out: the majority interest to Tomasz, the minority interest and cash bequest to Zofia.

The whole dispute, from the notice of challenge to the signed settlement, took just under eight months — slower than an uncontested estate, but far faster and cheaper than a trial would have been. Tomasz was able to resume paying out rental income to the beneficiaries within weeks of the settlement, and the estate closed with its administration essentially intact.

For Zofia, the resolution mattered in a different way than the dollar figure suggested. She had stayed out of the day-to-day argument between her siblings and worried the dispute would leave the family unable to speak to one another once it was over. Because the challenge ended in a negotiated release rather than a public trial with findings against Soo-jin personally, the family avoided the kind of courtroom record that tends to make reconciliation harder afterward, even as the estate's terms held firm.

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