A will that honoured fixed shares and still passed Ontario's signing rules

The situation

Keisha had already tried to solve this herself. She ran her family's numbers through an online inheritance calculator, printed the resulting percentages, and pasted them into a will template she found through a document service. She brought the finished document to our office not because something had gone wrong yet, but because her accountant looked at it during a tax planning meeting and told her, gently, that it would not hold up.

The accountant was right, though not for the reason Keisha expected. The template had reproduced her share percentages accurately enough; the calculator itself had done that part correctly. Its problem was structural: it treated a residential property in the Netherlands, jointly registered with her mother Anneke, as though it could simply be listed as an estate asset alongside her Hamilton dental practice and her Ontario investment accounts. It could not. Foreign real property generally passes according to the law of the country where it sits, not the law named in an Ontario will, and the template gave no indication anyone had thought about that. Nothing in the document even flagged the property as unusual.

Keisha's estate, built over two decades of practice ownership, sat in the two-and-a-half to three-and-a-half million dollar range once the practice, the Hamilton home, the investment accounts and her share of the Netherlands property were added together. Three people had a direct stake in getting the structure right: Keisha herself, her mother Anneke, who held the Netherlands property jointly and had her own retirement plans built partly around continuing to use it, and Anneke's husband Joost, a retired business owner whose late first marriage had already produced one contested estate in his own family and who was, understandably, cautious about anything that looked improvised.

The three did not disagree about the underlying wish. Keisha wanted her estate divided according to fixed Islamic inheritance shares, adjusted where Ontario law required a different mechanism to reach the same practical result. What she had was a document nobody in the family fully trusted, built from a calculator and a template that had never been reviewed by anyone who understood either Ontario succession law or the cross-border property. Keisha's own description of the process, looking back, was that she had solved the easy ninety percent of the problem and never realized the remaining ten percent was where all the risk actually lived.

The gap nobody had noticed

The gap was not in the arithmetic. The percentages Keisha had calculated for her children and her mother were internally consistent and reflected a defensible approach to fixed shares. The gap was in execution, and it had two parts, neither of which a calculator was ever going to catch.

First, the template's signing instructions did not match Ontario's formal requirements for a valid will. It called for a single witness where two are needed, and it did not address what happens if a witness is also a beneficiary, which can put that person's gift at risk even where the rest of the document is otherwise sound. Had Keisha signed it as printed, the document she believed reflected her wishes would very likely have failed as a will, sending her entire estate through the default rules that apply when someone dies without one. Those default rules bear no relationship to fixed inheritance shares; they follow a fixed statutory formula based on surviving spouse and children, with no mechanism for honouring a family's religious or personal distribution wishes at all.

Second, and more subtly, the template treated the Netherlands property as a line item to be assigned a percentage like any other asset. It could not be, because Keisha did not own it outright. She held it jointly with Anneke, under an arrangement created decades earlier when the family still lived in the Netherlands, and the way jointly held foreign property transfers on death depends on both the nature of that joint ownership and the country's own property rules, not on instructions written into an Ontario will. An Ontario document can describe an intention about that property, but it cannot compel a foreign land registry to follow it.

This is where the three parties' interests, aligned in principle, diverged in the details. Keisha wanted the Netherlands property's value reflected in her children's shares. Anneke wanted certainty that her own interest in the property, and her ability to continue using it, were not disturbed by a document she had not seen drafted and had no say in. Joost, watching from the side after his own family's experience, wanted the whole structure documented clearly enough that no one could later claim the will had been assembled casually, since that was precisely the argument that had dragged his own family's estate into dispute years earlier. None of the three had said this to each other directly. It surfaced only once we asked each of them, separately, what they were actually worried about, rather than assuming the family's shared goal meant their individual concerns were the same.

What we did

1. Set aside the template and started the estate structure from the actual assets. Rather than patch the existing document, we built a full inventory of the practice, the Hamilton home, the investment accounts and the Netherlands property, and confirmed which of these an Ontario will could actually govern, which turned out to be everything except the last one. Starting from the asset list rather than the flawed template avoided carrying forward any of its structural mistakes into the redraft.
2. Identified the foreign property as a separate legal problem. We explained to Keisha why the Netherlands property could not be assigned a percentage inside her Ontario will, and connected her with Netherlands counsel to confirm how her interest would actually pass, what document, if any, was needed there, and how long that side of the process was likely to take. Getting this coordinated early meant the two documents could be drafted to work together rather than risk contradicting each other later.
3. Rebuilt the inheritance schedule around the Ontario-governed assets. With the foreign property carved out and handled separately, we recalculated the fixed shares against the practice, the home and the investment accounts, so the percentages Keisha wanted were applied cleanly to assets an Ontario will could actually control, without the foreign property distorting the math. This produced a schedule Keisha could actually see reflected correctly on paper, rather than one that only worked in theory.
4. Met with Anneke and Joost separately to surface their concerns. Anneke's worry was her own continued interest in the jointly held property; Joost's was procedural rigour after his own family's earlier dispute. Hearing both directly, rather than through Keisha, let us address each concern precisely instead of guessing, and kept the will from becoming an unspoken negotiation between them. Separate conversations also meant neither in-law felt they had to raise a sensitive concern in front of the other.
5. Drafted a clause confirming Anneke's joint ownership interest was unaffected. We added language making clear the Ontario will made no claim over the Netherlands property and did not purport to alter Anneke's existing rights in it, which answered her concern without needing the foreign counsel's work to be finished first. That let the Ontario drafting proceed on schedule instead of stalling while the Netherlands side was still being confirmed.
6. Built in an execution record beyond the minimum signing requirements. Given Joost's concern about how the document would be perceived later, we kept a signing memorandum recording who was present, in what order the will was reviewed, and confirmation that no witness held a beneficial interest in the estate, creating a paper trail beyond what the law strictly demands and giving the family something concrete to point to if the will's validity were ever questioned years from now.
7. Executed the will to Ontario's formal requirements. Two independent witnesses, neither a beneficiary, signed alongside Keisha in the same sitting, closing the single-witness gap that had put the entire original document at risk of failing outright. Using independent witnesses removed any question later about whether a signature had put a gift at risk, and signing everyone together in one sitting avoided any later argument that the formalities had been completed out of order or at different times.
8. Circulated a plain-language summary to all three parties before signing. Keisha, Anneke and Joost each reviewed a summary of how the will worked and what it did and did not cover, so nobody was signing off, or standing by, on language they had not actually understood in its legal effect. A shared, plain-language understanding meant none of the three could later say the document had been rushed past them.

The outcome

Keisha signed a will that met Ontario's formal requirements and applied her fixed inheritance shares correctly to the assets it could govern. The Netherlands property was handled through a parallel process with local counsel, coordinated so the two documents did not conflict or duplicate instructions over the same asset, and so a Netherlands court reading the local document would not be confused by an Ontario will that appeared, at first glance, to also mention the property.

The cost of the correction was mostly Keisha's own time: two additional meetings, a delay of about six weeks while the Netherlands side was confirmed, and the fee for a second jurisdiction's legal advice on top of the Ontario work. None of that was wasted. The original template, if signed as printed, would have left her estate exposed to exactly the outcome she had been trying to avoid, an intestacy that ignored her wishes entirely, and would have left the Netherlands property's status genuinely unclear until someone eventually had to sort it out after her death, at a moment when nobody could ask her what she had actually intended.

Anneke's interest in the jointly held property was left undisturbed, and she had a document in hand explaining exactly why, in language she could read herself rather than take on faith. Joost's concern about rigour was met with a signing process that could withstand scrutiny if it were ever questioned later, which mattered more to him than any single clause in the will itself, given what his own family had already been through. All three left the process with the same understanding of what the will did and did not do, which is often the more durable outcome than the drafting itself, since a family that agrees on what a document means is far less likely to end up disputing it later.

Keisha's practice and investment accounts now pass under a document that will actually hold up, and the Netherlands property sits under a separate, coordinated arrangement rather than an ambiguous line in a template neither jurisdiction's law could give effect to.

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