Three grandchildren, a Kenora estate, and numbers that would not add to one hundred

The situation

Somchai called us on a Tuesday afternoon, holding a copy of his late grandmother's will and a calculator, sounding less upset than genuinely confused. He had been adding up the percentages the will assigned to him, his sister Azadeh, and their cousin Niloufar, and however he arranged the numbers, they came to ninety percent, not one hundred. He wanted to know if that was normal, if wills sometimes just left a gap like that, or if something had gone wrong.

The estate behind the question was substantial, somewhere between one and a quarter and two and a half million dollars, built mostly from a Kenora rental property their grandmother had owned outright and a sizeable investment account accumulated over a long working life. Somchai, an architect, and Azadeh, an air traffic controller, had both assumed the will divided everything cleanly among the three grandchildren, their grandmother's only heirs, in shares that reflected years of conversations she had had with each of them about what she wanted. Niloufar had not raised any concerns yet, but Somchai suspected that whatever the missing ten percent turned out to be, it mattered enough to sort out properly before anyone started relying on numbers that might be wrong.

He was right to be cautious. A will that does not account for the full estate is not simply an oversight to shrug off; it usually means the residue clause, the provision that says what happens to whatever is left after the specific gifts are paid out, ends up doing more work than the drafter intended, sometimes scooping up a share meant for someone else entirely. Depending on how the document was worded, that missing ten percent could default to one grandchild rather than being split three ways, and nobody in the family had any way of knowing, just from reading the will, which outcome the document actually produced.

Somchai's instinct not to guess, and not to let the estate distribute on faulty math, turned out to be the single most useful decision in the whole file. He had no theory yet about what had happened, only a firm sense that dividing a two-and-a-half-million-dollar estate on the strength of arithmetic that plainly did not work was not something the three of them should simply accept because the document was signed.

Where it went wrong

We started where any accounting problem starts, by going back to the source rather than trying to interpret the finished document in isolation. We requested the complete drafting file from the lawyer who had originally prepared the will several years earlier, including the instructions their grandmother had given, the early drafts, and the notes taken during each meeting where changes were discussed.

The file told a clear story once we laid the drafts out in order. The earliest draft split the estate three ways in unequal but specific shares, forty percent to Somchai, thirty-five to Azadeh, and twenty-five to Niloufar, reflecting differences in what each grandchild had already received from their grandmother during her lifetime. A middle draft, prepared after a further meeting, added a separate clause directing a specific ten-thousand-dollar bequest to a local charity their grandmother had supported for years, adjusting the three percentage shares slightly downward to make room for it within the whole.

Between that draft and the final signed version, the charitable clause was removed, apparently at their grandmother's request after she decided to make that gift separately during her lifetime instead. But whoever revised the document to remove it did not restore the ten percentage points that clause had been carved out to accommodate. The three shares stayed at their reduced, charity-adjusted numbers, thirty-six, thirty-one, and twenty-three by our reconstruction, while the ten percent that clause had occupied simply disappeared from the document instead of being reallocated back to the family.

Under the will as executed, that gap would fall into the residue, and the residue clause, drafted early and never revisited, directed any residue to Niloufar alone. A deletion made to reflect a decision their grandmother had actually made, moving the charitable gift outside the will, had accidentally handed one grandchild an extra tenth of a multi-million dollar estate that nothing in the file suggested she ever intended.

None of this was visible from the signed will alone. The document read as internally consistent unless someone actually added the percentages, and even then, a missing ten percent could plausibly have looked like an intentional gap rather than the fingerprint of a deleted clause. Only the sequence of drafts, read together, showed the shares had been adjusted downward for a reason that no longer applied by the time the will was finalized.

What we did

1. Requested the complete drafting file from the original lawyer, including every draft and meeting note going back to the earliest instructions, because a numbers discrepancy this precise almost always has a documented history behind it rather than being a stray typo, and we needed the whole sequence, not just the final version, to see what had actually happened. Requesting the entire file, rather than asking pointed questions about a single clause, meant nothing relevant could be left out of what we eventually reviewed.
2. Laid the drafts out in chronological order and compared the share percentages and clauses version by version, line by line, which is what actually surfaced the charitable bequest clause and its later removal as the exact point where the numbers stopped adding up. Reading the drafts in sequence, rather than jumping straight to the final version, let us see the shares change step by step and pinpoint exactly which edit created the gap Somchai had noticed with his calculator.
3. Rebuilt the estate accounting from scratch, mapping what each grandchild would receive under the will as executed against what the drafting history showed their grandmother had actually intended once the charitable clause dropped away, so the gap was expressed in real dollars against the actual estate value rather than left as an abstract ten percent nobody could picture. Putting the discrepancy in dollar terms also made clear to all three grandchildren exactly what was at stake in getting the correction right.
4. Obtained a sworn affidavit from the drafting lawyer, confirming that the percentage adjustment had never been reinstated after the charitable clause was removed and that this reflected a drafting oversight rather than any deliberate later change genuinely made to reflect the grandmother's wishes. A sworn statement from the person who actually prepared the document carried far more weight with the court than our own reconstruction of the drafts alone, however careful that reconstruction had been.
5. Notified Azadeh and Niloufar of what the file showed, before filing anything with the court, so that the correction was transparent to everyone affected from the outset rather than something Somchai appeared to be pursuing unilaterally on his own behalf. Bringing them in early, with the same documents Somchai had seen, meant neither cousin could later feel blindsided by a court application affecting their own inheritance, which mattered for keeping the family working together rather than against each other.
6. Prepared an application to the court to rectify the will, asking that the shares be corrected to reflect the percentages the drafting history supported, on the basis that the final signed document did not match the testator's documented intentions due to a clerical drafting error rather than a genuine change of heart. Framing the application around a documented clerical error, rather than a broader dispute over what their grandmother might have wanted, kept the legal question narrow and answerable.
7. Supported the application with the full drafting record, the sequence of drafts, the meeting notes, and the lawyer's affidavit, giving the court a clear, documented basis for correcting the will rather than asking a judge to infer intent from thin or conflicting evidence. Presenting the complete paper trail, rather than a summary of it, let the court see for itself exactly how the error had happened and why the requested correction was the only outcome the evidence supported.
8. Coordinated with Azadeh's and Niloufar's own counsel to reach a consent position before the hearing date, since all three grandchildren, once shown the same drafting history side by side, agreed the correction reflected what their grandmother had actually wanted rather than what the flawed document happened to say. Reaching consent in advance turned what could have been a contested, adversarial hearing into a straightforward formality, saving the estate both time and legal expense.

The outcome

The court granted the rectification application. With the drafting history laid out clearly and all three grandchildren in agreement about what the record showed, the hearing was straightforward rather than contested, and the judge corrected the will's share percentages to forty, thirty-five, and twenty-five, restoring the shares to what the earliest draft set out before the charitable clause was ever added, and closing the gap that had let the residue clause absorb an extra tenth of a multi-million dollar estate that no version of the drafting file suggested their grandmother ever intended for one grandchild alone.

The estate distributed according to the corrected shares rather than the flawed document, meaning Niloufar's share settled at the figure the drafting history actually supported rather than the inflated one the uncorrected error would otherwise have produced. Because she had been included in the process from early on and shown the same drafting file everyone else saw, the correction did not read to her as an attack on what she was owed, and she consented to the outcome rather than resisting it, which kept the whole matter out of a contested hearing entirely.

The whole process, from Somchai's first phone call to the court's order, took a little under a year, longer than an estate with no errors would have taken but far shorter and far less expensive than a contested dispute over the same money would have run had one grandchild simply accepted the extra share and the other two been left to challenge it after the fact. What made the difference was not a clever legal argument so much as patient reconstruction: nobody could say with real confidence what their grandmother intended until someone actually rebuilt the numbers from her own drafting file and let the sequence of documents speak for itself rather than relying on memory or assumption.

All three grandchildren, Somchai said afterward, came out of the process on better terms with each other than they might have expected given how the dispute started. Bringing the discrepancy forward early, and treating it as a shared puzzle to solve rather than a private advantage to protect, kept the correction from ever curdling into a fight.

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