One branch had six grandchildren, the other had one, and the will said nothing

The situation

Goran's practical fear was simple: if the will meant what the other side said it meant, his own four children would each receive roughly a sixth of what Jelena's one child would receive, out of an estate their shared parent had always described as being left equally to 'my grandchildren, in equal branches.' That phrase, written into a will drafted decades earlier and never updated, was the entire dispute, and it was Goran's four kids' university funds, not an abstract point of drafting, that he pictured every time he thought about losing it.

Goran and his sister Jelena were the only two children of a parent who had died several months earlier, leaving an estate of roughly one and a half million dollars built from a home, a modest investment portfolio and a life insurance policy naming the estate as beneficiary. The will left the residue 'to my grandchildren, in equal branches, per stirpes.' At the time it was drafted, Goran had two children. By the time his parent died, he had four. Jelena had one child, Sampath, throughout, and nobody had thought to revisit the will's wording as the family grew.

The phrase 'per stirpes' has a specific and long-settled meaning: it divides an estate by branch, so each line of descendants shares one portion, split further among however many people are in that line. Under that reading, Goran's branch of four children would collectively receive half the estate, split four ways, and Jelena's one child, Sampath, would receive the other half outright. That was consistent with the will's plain wording. It was also, in Goran's view, not what his parent had actually meant by 'equal,' since it meant each of his children received a fraction of what Jelena's child received, a result that felt, to him, like the opposite of the word his parent had chosen to use.

The file had not started with our office. Goran had retained another lawyer shortly after the death, who had begun corresponding with Jelena's lawyer on the theory that 'equal branches' was ambiguous enough to argue for a per capita division instead, splitting the estate five ways among all five grandchildren equally. That lawyer left practice partway through the file for unrelated reasons, and Goran came to us with a half-finished negotiation, a position already stated in writing to the other side, and a hard deadline: Jelena's lawyer had asked for a response to a settlement offer within three weeks, leaving no time to start the file over from a blank page.

What the other side was relying on

Jelena's position rested on two things, and both were stronger than Goran had been told. The first was the term itself. 'Per stirpes' is not a phrase courts treat as ambiguous by default; it has a settled technical meaning in estate law, and a will that uses it deliberately is generally read to have adopted that meaning unless something else in the document points clearly the other way. The word 'equal' sitting next to it did not automatically override it, because 'equal branches' is itself a description of what per stirpes does: each branch is treated equally, even if the individuals within a branch are not.

The second was timing. Jelena's lawyer had pulled the drafting file from the original will-drafting lawyer's retired practice records and found a marginal note from the drafting meeting, made at the time Goran had only two children, recording the parent's instruction as 'split evenly by family, not by head.' That note was contemporaneous, predated any dispute, and matched the technical meaning of per stirpes exactly. It significantly undercut the argument that 'equal branches' had been used loosely.

The previous lawyer's opening position, that the estate should be split five ways per capita, had been sent to Jelena's side in writing before that drafting note surfaced. Once it did, continuing to press the per capita argument risked looking less like a genuine interpretation dispute and more like an attempt to relitigate a position the evidence had already weakened. Judges and opposing counsel both notice when a party's argument does not adjust as new evidence comes in.

None of this meant Goran had no ground to stand on. The note recorded an instruction from a meeting decades earlier, and instructions can be misremembered or incompletely captured. There was also a live argument that if the parent had wanted a strict per stirpes result, adding the word 'equal' at all was an odd choice. But arguing that a settled legal term meant something other than its settled meaning is a difficult position to win outright, and it was important that Goran understand that before deciding how hard to press it. A court weighing that kind of argument tends to ask what a reasonable reader, standing in the parent's shoes at the moment of signing, would have understood the words to mean, and a reasonable reader who chose the phrase 'per stirpes' deliberately is generally taken to have known, or been advised, what it does.

What we did

We started by reviewing the full file inherited from the previous lawyer, including every piece of correspondence already sent to Jelena's side, before doing anything further. The prior position had been stated in writing and could not simply be withdrawn without cost to Goran's credibility in the negotiation, so the first task was understanding exactly what had already been committed to on his behalf, and how Jelena's side had responded to it so far.

We then obtained the drafting lawyer's full file, not just the marginal note Jelena's side had produced, to see it in context rather than relying on the other side's excerpt of it. The complete file supported the note's accuracy; there was no surrounding ambiguity in the record that would have let us argue it had been taken out of context or written down carelessly. We also checked the date of the note against the family's own recollection of when Goran's third and fourth children were born, to see whether the parent might plausibly have updated the instruction later and simply never told the drafting lawyer. Nothing in the file suggested that had happened.

With that confirmed, we gave Goran a candid assessment: continuing to press for a strict per capita division carried a real risk of losing outright at trial, after months of delay and legal costs that would come out of the estate before either side saw a distribution. We laid out plainly what a court was likely to do with a settled technical term, a supporting drafting note, and a weaker textual argument on Goran's side, so he could weigh that risk honestly against the alternative of settling on adjusted terms rather than gambling the whole outcome on a trial.

We then reopened negotiations with Jelena's lawyer on different footing, proposing a settlement that kept the per stirpes structure the will actually specified but added a fixed cash adjustment from Jelena's branch to Goran's, reflecting that four grandchildren from one household would otherwise carry meaningfully less individually than one grandchild in the other. This did not rewrite the will's division; it addressed the practical hardship without asking Jelena to give up the legal position the drafting record supported, which made it a proposal she could accept without feeling she had lost the underlying argument. Jelena's side, wanting to avoid a trial as much as Goran did, engaged with the proposal within the deadline already set, and the two lawyers exchanged three rounds of adjusted numbers before landing on a figure both families could live with. Throughout, we kept Goran updated after every exchange rather than waiting for a final number, so he was never negotiating blind or wondering what had been offered on his behalf.

The outcome

The estate was ultimately distributed under the will's per stirpes structure, with Goran's branch of four children collectively receiving half and Sampath, Jelena's one child, receiving the other half. That was, on its face, the outcome Goran had come to us hoping to avoid, and it is worth being direct about that rather than dressing the result up as something it was not. The negotiated cash adjustment softened it: Jelena's branch agreed to a fixed transfer, in the low tens of thousands of dollars, from her share to Goran's, reducing but not eliminating the gap in what each grandchild would individually receive.

The adjustment was possible only because both sides had clear legal advice about how a court was likely to read the will, and because Jelena had an incentive to settle rather than risk a trial that could also expose her own share to litigation costs eating into the estate before either family saw a cent. Neither side got the full outcome they might have hoped for at the start of the dispute, which is often the honest shape of a negotiated settlement rather than a clean win for either party.

Goran's honest assessment afterward was that he wished he had come to our office, or gotten a candid read on the drafting note, before the previous lawyer's opening letter had staked out a position the evidence did not support. That letter did not lose him the case outright, but it cost negotiating credibility that a cleaner opening position would very likely have preserved, and it is a fair question whether the final cash adjustment would have been larger had the file started on firmer footing. The estate was distributed roughly five months after the settlement was reached, closing a dispute that could otherwise have run well past a year in litigation, with legal costs on both sides eating further into what four grandchildren and one grandchild each stood to receive.

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