A Minor's Inheritance Almost Went to the Court, Not the Family

The situation

Karim and Ming's mother died suddenly in late 2025 after decades building a successful dental practice in Burlington, which she had sold two years earlier while keeping the proceeds invested. Her estate, once the sale proceeds, a paid-off home and a diversified investment portfolio were added up, came to roughly $4.2 million. Her will, drafted more than a decade earlier, was simple: everything split equally, one-third each, to her three children.

Karim, now a dentist who owns his own practice, and Ming, who owns several locations of a fast-casual restaurant franchise, were named co-executors. Their younger sibling Liang was fifteen. Under the will, Liang's one-third share worked out to roughly $1.4 million, left outright with no conditions, no age of distribution and no trustee named to hold it until Liang grew up.

Karim and Ming assumed they could simply keep Liang's share invested and hand it over gradually as Liang got older, the way many families informally manage a young person's money. Their estate lawyer's first review of the will made clear that assumption was wrong, and that the size of the inheritance meant the province had a formal role to play whether the family wanted one or not.

What the estate review found

In Ontario, a minor cannot receive an inheritance directly, and a parent or sibling cannot simply hold a large sum on a child's behalf without legal authority to do so. Where a will leaves money outright to a beneficiary who is under eighteen and does not set up a trust to hold it, the default under Ontario's succession and children's law framework is that the funds are paid to the Accountant of the Superior Court of Justice, an office that holds money for minors until they turn eighteen, investing it conservatively and releasing it as a lump sum on their birthday. For an amount the size of Liang's share, that meant roughly $1.4 million sitting in a government-administered account for three years, invested for capital preservation rather than growth, then released to an eighteen-year-old all at once with no structure at all.

Because the amount was substantial, the estate lawyer also flagged that the Office of the Children's Lawyer, a branch of the Ontario government that represents the interests of minors in exactly this kind of situation, would need to be notified and would have a say in how the estate was finalized. Karim and Ming could not simply agree among themselves to manage Liang's share privately; any alternative to paying the money into court required the Office of the Children's Lawyer's involvement and, ultimately, a court order.

The siblings were unhappy on two fronts. They did not want their youngest sibling's inheritance parked in a low-yield government account for three years, and they were uneasy about Liang receiving $1.4 million outright and unsupervised at eighteen, with no experience managing money and grief still fresh from losing their mother. They wanted a family-administered trust instead, with Karim and Ming as trustees, paying out gradually into Liang's late twenties.

What we did

1. Confirmed the will offered no other route. Our team reviewed the original will and any amending documents to make certain there was no overlooked trust clause or power that would let the executors hold Liang's share privately. There was none, which meant a court application was the only way to avoid the default payment into court.
2. Prepared an application to vary how the funds would be held. Rather than accept the default, we brought an application asking the court to approve a trust arrangement for Liang's share, naming a trustee and setting out investment and distribution terms, in place of payment to the Accountant of the Superior Court of Justice.
3. Engaged with the Office of the Children's Lawyer early. We provided the office with full financial disclosure of the estate, the proposed trust terms and an explanation of why the family believed a longer, staged distribution served Liang's interests better than a lump sum at eighteen. Early, transparent engagement matters here: the office is far more receptive to a well-documented proposal than to one it discovers only at a court hearing.
4. Negotiated the trustee structure. The office raised a legitimate concern: family members acting as sole trustees for a large sum, over more than a decade, with no independent oversight, is exactly the kind of arrangement the default rule exists to guard against. We negotiated a structure where a licensed trust company would act as co-trustee alongside Karim, with annual accountings filed and available to the office throughout the trust's life.
5. Negotiated the distribution schedule. The family's original proposal, extending the trust into Liang's late twenties, went further than the office was prepared to support without stronger justification than the general sense that their sibling was not ready. We proposed a middle path: continued professional management until eighteen, with partial, scheduled distributions at twenty-one and twenty-five, and the balance released at twenty-five rather than a single lump sum at eighteen or a full decade-plus delay.
6. Brought the negotiated terms back to the court. Once the office indicated it would support the revised structure, we filed the terms with the court for approval, which is required before any alternative to the standard payment-into-court rule takes effect.

The outcome

The court approved the negotiated trust roughly five months after the application was filed. Liang's $1.4 million share went into a professionally managed trust rather than a government custodial account, with Karim as co-trustee alongside the trust company and Ming kept informed as a beneficiary of the wider estate but not a trustee of Liang's specific share.

It was not the outcome Karim and Ming first wanted. They did not get to administer the money themselves without independent oversight, and Liang will receive a meaningful portion of the inheritance at twenty-one rather than waiting until twenty-five as the family originally hoped. The trust company's fees, paid from the trust itself, are a real ongoing cost that a family-run arrangement would have avoided. Both sides gave up something: the Office of the Children's Lawyer accepted a distribution schedule later than the default age of eighteen, and the family accepted independent trusteeship and a partial payout earlier than they preferred.

What the family avoided was the outcome that would have applied automatically without the application: roughly $1.4 million invested conservatively in a court-administered account for three years, then handed to an eighteen-year-old in a single payment with no professional guidance and no staged introduction to managing significant money. The negotiated trust gave Liang steady, professionally invested growth through the teenage years, continuity of family involvement through Karim's co-trustee role, and a gradual introduction to the money instead of a single cheque on a birthday.

What you can learn from this