When a Father's Old Songs Still Paid the Bills

The situation

Adaeze's father spent the second half of his working life as an air traffic controller, guiding aircraft over the Ottawa Valley for close to thirty years before retiring to a quiet house in Deep River. On paper, his estate looked straightforward: the Deep River house, a small apartment in Lagos he had bought decades earlier and never quite let go of, and modest savings. His will named Adaeze as executor and split everything evenly between her and her sister Ama.

What made the estate less ordinary was a fifth line item that did not fit neatly into a spreadsheet: royalties. Before air traffic control, he had spent almost a decade recording and touring as a musician, and five of the songs from that period had quietly kept earning money ever since, usually a few hundred dollars a month through streaming, with the occasional larger payment when a television production licensed one of the tracks. He had always treated the royalties as a pleasant footnote to his working life, not something anyone needed to manage carefully, and the will simply directed that whatever the songs earned going forward would be split between his daughters the same way as everything else.

That arrangement held together fine as long as nobody asked where the money actually came from or who else might have a claim on it. Within a few months of the funeral, a letter arrived from Jerome, a man neither daughter had met, who introduced himself as their father's former bandmate and said he had co-written at least two, possibly three, of the five songs. He said the two men had made an informal understanding forty years earlier and that he had simply trusted his friend rather than insisting on a signed splits agreement, and that he had never been paid a share of the royalties in all the years since.

Adaeze had no way to know whether Jerome's claim was accurate. Ama, who worked as an accountant, went looking through what financial records their father had kept, hoping the bank statements would settle the question one way or the other. They did not. There was no original recording contract in his papers, no splits sheet from the record label, and no correspondence that clearly named who owned what. The estate had two properties in two countries, a will that assumed clean ownership of the royalties, and now a claim that could not be dismissed and could not be confirmed.

The risk we had to size

A one-time asset is comparatively simple to fight over: a house is worth what it is worth, and a court or a negotiation eventually settles who gets what. An ongoing royalty stream is a different kind of problem, because getting the answer wrong does not end the dispute, it just sets the terms for how long it runs. If the estate paid Jerome nothing and he was right, the daughters would be knowingly keeping money that was not theirs to keep, indefinitely. If the estate conceded a share and he was wrong, they would be handing away part of their father's legacy every month for as long as the songs kept earning, with no clean way to take it back later.

The missing paperwork made the risk harder to size rather than easier. Without an original contract or splits sheet, we could not simply point to a document and settle the question. We had to work out how strong Jerome's claim actually was from indirect evidence, and be honest with Adaeze and Ama about what that evidence could and could not prove. A forty-year-old claim also raised a real question about how much of it could still be pursued at all, since Ontario's limitation rules generally require claims to be brought within a set window of when a person knew, or ought to have known, that they had one, and Jerome's own account put that knowledge decades in the past.

The cross-border element added another layer. The Lagos apartment meant the estate already had to deal with a second country's process for transferring property, and the royalties themselves were administered through international agreements between the collecting society and various publishers, which meant any change to who was credited on the songs would need to work its way through more than one organization before payments actually changed hands. Litigating a contested co-writing claim in open court, with expert evidence on authorship and cross-examination on decades-old memories, could easily run past what either side's share of the royalties was worth, while the underlying payments sat frozen or contested the entire time.

Our job at this stage was not to decide who was right. It was to give Adaeze and Ama a realistic range: how likely was Jerome's claim to succeed if it went to a hearing, what would it cost in time and legal fees to find out, and what would a negotiated outcome need to look like to be better than that gamble for everyone.

What we did

1. Requested the full royalty history from the collecting society. Rather than relying on their father's personal bank records, which only showed deposits and not their source, we went directly to the organization that actually tracked and paid the royalties, which held decades of statements showing exactly which songs were earning, how much, and under what writer credits, giving us a far more complete picture than anything in the estate's own files.
2. Cross-referenced the credited writers against the surviving family records. The collecting society's files listed writer splits that had been entered decades earlier and never updated since. Comparing those entries against the few personal letters and old contracts Adaeze and Ama could still find helped us see where the official record and the family's understanding of events matched, and where they clearly diverged.
3. Retained an independent music industry consultant to review the recordings. Because authorship on older, informally recorded songs can sometimes be worked out from the recordings themselves, we brought in someone with genuine expertise in that era of independent music production to assess whether the surviving audio and any studio notes supported Jerome's account of co-writing specific songs, and to flag where the evidence was simply too thin to say either way.
4. Sent Jerome a formal request for whatever evidence he had. We asked him directly for anything supporting his claim, from old demo tapes to correspondence to any prior royalty statements naming him. His response, while not conclusive on its own, included a handful of items that gave his account real weight for two of the five songs and considerably less for the third, which shaped where we were willing to negotiate.
5. Assessed the limitations question honestly rather than leading with it. A claim raised decades after the fact invites an obvious defence based on how much time has passed, but leaning on that alone risked looking like a technicality that dodged the merits entirely, which would have made a fair negotiated settlement much harder to reach in good faith. Resolving the claim on its actual merits mattered more to Adaeze and Ama than winning on a technicality neither of them would have felt entirely comfortable relying on.
6. Modelled several settlement structures against the cost of a contested hearing. We set out, in plain terms, what years of litigation might cost in legal fees and frozen royalty payments against what conceding a share of two songs would cost the estate over a realistic projection of future earnings, so Adaeze and Ama could compare the options on the same footing rather than guessing.
7. Negotiated a documented split with Jerome's counsel. Once both sides had reviewed the same underlying evidence, we reached an agreement covering only the two songs where his contribution was best supported, formalized in a way the collecting society could implement directly, so future payments would divide automatically rather than requiring either family to track or chase anything manually. Registering the agreement with the collecting society, rather than relying on the families to enforce it privately, meant the split would hold on its own even if contact between them faded.

The outcome

The final agreement gave Jerome an ongoing share of royalties from two of the five songs, in a percentage negotiated to reflect the strength of the evidence rather than an even split. The estate retained full ownership of the other three songs, along with the Deep River house and the Lagos apartment, which were dealt with separately once the royalty question was settled. Nobody involved got everything they might have hoped for going in, and that was the point: the settlement reflected a genuine, if imperfect, picture of who had contributed what, built from records that had to be reassembled rather than simply produced from a filing cabinet.

Adaeze and Ama gave up a portion of income they had assumed was fully theirs, which was a real concession, not a symbolic one, over the likely lifetime of the songs' earnings. In exchange, they avoided a dispute that could have taken years to resolve through a hearing, kept the collecting society's payments flowing without interruption during that time, and closed the file with a documented agreement rather than an open question that could resurface with the next generation of the family, including their own children eventually.

The estate was distributed roughly nine months after the settlement was finalized, later than the family had originally hoped but well within a normal range for an estate involving cross-border property and a contested claim. The royalty split now runs automatically through the collecting society's own systems, which means neither family has to track or chase payments going forward, and the written agreement gives both sides a clear reference if any question about it comes up again. Ama, drawing on her own professional instincts, later said the hardest part had never been the negotiation itself, but accepting that some questions about their father's early life were never going to have a fully documented answer.

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