The Dental Practice Owner Whose Partner Would Have Inherited Nothing

The situation

Arjun had owned his dental practice in London for close to fifteen years, and for the last eleven of them he had shared a home and a life with Priya, a specialist physician. They had never married — it had simply never come up as something either of them felt they needed — but their finances were thoroughly intertwined. Priya had co-signed the loan that let Arjun buy out his practice's previous owner. Both names were on the mortgage for their house. They filed taxes as common-law partners and had built a household worth, between the practice, the house, and their combined savings and investments, somewhere in the range of $3.5 million.

The prompt to look at their estate planning came from an unrelated source: Arjun's accountant, doing year-end planning, asked in passing whether they had wills in place given the value tied up in the practice. Neither of them did. Arjun had always assumed that, as Priya's partner of over a decade, she would simply inherit if something happened to him — the same assumption most people carry into a long-term relationship, married or not. He raised it with our team mostly to confirm that assumption and get the paperwork formalized. It was not.

What the review found

Ontario's intestacy rules, set out in the Succession Law Reform Act, determine who inherits when a person dies without a valid will. Those rules give an automatic share to a person's married spouse and, after that, to their children, and only if neither exists do they move outward to parents, then siblings, then more distant relatives. A common-law partner — no matter how long the relationship, how intertwined the finances, or how much the partner contributed to a shared home or business — has no automatic entitlement under those rules at all. Ontario law extends spousal support obligations and some other protections to common-law partners in specific contexts, but the intestacy scheme that decides who inherits property when there is no will is not one of them.

Applied to Arjun's situation, the consequence was stark. Arjun had no children and both of his parents had passed away, which meant that under the intestacy rules, his entire estate — the dental practice, his half of the house, his savings — would pass to his siblings, starting with his sister Kasia, with whom he was close but who had no connection to the practice and no history of financial contribution to it. Priya, despite eleven years of shared life and a direct financial stake in the home and the loan that helped buy the practice, would have no automatic claim to any of it. She would have been left to pursue a claim against the estate on other legal grounds — a possible but uncertain, slow, and adversarial path — rather than simply inheriting as a spouse would have.

There was a second, more immediate problem layered on top of the inheritance question. Without a will naming an executor, someone would need to apply to the Superior Court to be appointed as the estate's administrator before anyone could deal with the practice at all — sell it, wind it down, or transfer it to another dentist. A practice with active patients, staff, and ongoing regulatory obligations cannot simply sit unattended while that process plays out, which in an intestacy can take months. The combination — the wrong people inheriting, and a delay before anyone had legal authority to act — was exactly the kind of scenario a will is built to prevent.

What we did

1. Drafted wills for both Arjun and Priya. Each named the other as primary beneficiary and executor, with straightforward alternate provisions if they died together or in close succession. This alone solved the core problem: on Arjun's death, his estate — practice included — would pass to Priya directly, under the terms of his will rather than the default rules that would otherwise have bypassed her entirely.
2. Built specific instructions around the practice into Arjun's will. A dental practice is not a passive asset like a savings account; it has patients, staff, a lease, and regulatory requirements that a sole practitioner's death can disrupt quickly. We included direction empowering Priya, as executor, to retain a locum or manage a sale process without needing to wait for a lengthy court process to get the authority to act, and discussed with Arjun separately whether a shareholder or buy-sell arrangement with another dentist made sense as a further layer of protection — a decision he chose to revisit later rather than build into this round of planning.
3. Prepared powers of attorney for property and for personal care for both Arjun and Priya. A will only takes effect on death. Without a power of attorney, if either of them became incapacitated by illness or injury while still alive, the other would have no automatic legal authority to manage finances or make care decisions — a common-law partner has no more automatic authority in incapacity than in inheritance. Both documents named the other as primary attorney.
4. Reviewed beneficiary designations on registered accounts and insurance. Some assets, like Priya's group life insurance through her hospital work and both of their retirement accounts, pass by beneficiary designation rather than through the will. We checked each one against the plan to make sure the designations matched the couple's intentions rather than defaulting to an old designation or an outdated form left over from years earlier.
5. Talked through what would happen if the relationship, not the will, changed. Because the plan gave Priya such a central role, we discussed in plain terms how a separation would affect these documents, and recommended a periodic review — roughly every few years, or after any major life change — rather than treating the wills as a one-time task.

The outcome

Nothing dramatic happened after the documents were signed, which was the point. Arjun and Priya left with a plan that matched the life they had actually built together: if either of them died, the other would inherit directly and would have the legal authority to act immediately, without a court application standing between a death and the ability to keep a working dental practice running for its patients and staff. Kasia remained named as an alternate beneficiary further down the chain, reflecting the relationship Arjun wanted to preserve with his sister without leaving her as the unintended primary heir of a $3.5 million estate she had no role in building.

The practice itself was never at risk during the planning process — there was no health scare, no diagnosis, no urgency beyond an accountant's routine question. That is exactly why the case is worth telling. The gap in Ontario's intestacy rules for common-law partners does not announce itself; it sits quietly in the background of a relationship until a death makes it impossible to fix. Arjun and Priya closed that gap on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon, with time to think it through carefully instead of scrambling.

What you can learn from this