A caregiver's promised royalty income depended on someone she had never met

The situation

Sunita and Gita had known each other longer than Gita had known her own son, in the sense that mattered most in Gita's final years. Sunita moved into Gita's Uxbridge home as a live-in caregiver when Gita was seventy-four, initially for a few months while Gita recovered from a hip surgery, and stayed for eleven years. She managed medications, drove Gita to appointments, cooked, and, as Gita's memory began to slip in her final two years, handled her mail and her bills. Gita's son Raymond, a transit operator who lived several hours away, visited a handful of times a year and called on Sundays.

Gita had spent much of her career as a research scientist before retiring, and one invention from that career, a component used in a piece of industrial equipment, had been licensed decades earlier to a manufacturer in exchange for ongoing royalty payments. By the time Sunita came into Gita's life, those royalties were modest but steady, arriving quarterly and totaling a meaningful piece of Gita's income, part of an estate that would eventually be worth somewhere between 300,000 and 600,000 dollars including the royalty stream's estimated remaining value.

Gita updated her will four years before she died, after Sunita had already been caring for her for years without any real financial security of her own. The will named Sunita as a beneficiary entitled to half of the ongoing royalty income for as long as it continued to be paid, with the other half going to Raymond, alongside the rest of the estate being split according to a separate schedule. Gita told Sunita about this arrangement directly, more than once, and Sunita believed, reasonably, that it settled the matter.

What neither of them fully appreciated was that the royalty payments did not simply flow automatically to whoever the will named. They were governed by a licensing agreement between Gita and the manufacturer, a decades-old document that predated Sunita's arrival by years and that neither Gita nor Sunita had ever read closely. When Gita died, it was that document, not the will alone, that would determine who the manufacturer was actually obligated to pay.

Sunita had given up other work over the years to keep caring for Gita full time, first cutting her hours as an administrative assistant and eventually leaving that job entirely as Gita's needs grew. She had no pension of her own to speak of, and the royalty share Gita promised her had become, in her own mind, something close to a retirement plan, built on eleven years of a relationship that had gone well beyond a paid arrangement. When Gita passed away quietly in her sleep, Sunita expected grief, and a great deal of paperwork. She did not expect a dispute over whether the money would reach her at all.

Where it went wrong

The licensing agreement named Gita, by name, as the party entitled to receive royalty payments, with a clause allowing payments to continue to her estate or heirs after her death, but requiring written notice and supporting documentation to be delivered to the manufacturer's licensing department before any redirection of payments would take effect. It said nothing about splitting the payments between two people, and nothing about how a caregiver named in a will, as opposed to a blood relative, should be treated for the manufacturer's internal purposes.

The manufacturer's licensing department, once notified of Gita's death, took the position that it would resume payments to a single named payee, consistent with how the account had operated for decades, and asked the estate to designate one person to receive the funds and manage any internal split privately. Raymond, who was named executor as well as a co-beneficiary of the royalty income, was the obvious candidate from the manufacturer's point of view, and the manufacturer set up the account accordingly, with payments beginning to flow to him alone within a few weeks of receiving the estate's notice.

That put Sunita in a difficult position. The will was clear about her entitlement to half the royalty income, but the mechanism for actually receiving it now ran entirely through Raymond, a person Sunita barely knew and who had shown little warmth toward her during Gita's illness, having once suggested, within Sunita's hearing, that Sunita's role in the will was more generous than a caregiver deserved. Raymond was not required by the manufacturer to split anything; the manufacturer's obligation ended once it paid the named account holder, leaving the question of Sunita's share entirely between Sunita and Raymond.

Sunita had no direct relationship with the manufacturer, no standing to demand they change how they administered the account, and no leverage beyond the will itself, which was clear about her entitlement but silent on how to enforce it against a licensing company that had structured its own payment system around a single payee decades before any of this dispute existed.

Weeks passed without any payment reaching Sunita at all. Raymond, once the funds began arriving, did not raise the split on his own, and when Sunita finally called him directly, he told her he was still figuring out the estate's finances and would deal with it eventually, an answer that gave her little confidence given the tone he had struck earlier about her role in Gita's will. It was at that point, watching a promise Gita had made repeatedly begin to slip away in practice, that Sunita called our office.

What we did

1. Obtained and reviewed the original licensing agreement between Gita and the manufacturer, which neither Sunita nor, it turned out, Raymond had ever read in full, to understand exactly what the manufacturer was and was not obligated to do following Gita's death. That review showed the agreement's silence was the real source of the dispute: it neither authorized nor forbade a split, which meant the manufacturer defaulting to a single payee was a matter of administrative convenience, not a legal requirement we would need to overturn.
2. Confirmed the will's language was legally sound on its own terms, establishing clearly that Sunita held a genuine, enforceable entitlement to half the royalty income rather than a moral claim resting on Gita's spoken promises. That distinction mattered directly: it meant the negotiation with Raymond started from Sunita's position as a beneficiary with a real legal right, not as someone asking for a favour he was free to ignore.
3. Contacted the manufacturer's licensing department directly to ask whether the royalty account could be restructured to pay two beneficiaries independently, rather than continuing to route every payment through a single payee who would then need to redistribute funds privately, with no legal obligation to actually follow through on doing so each quarter, and asked what internal approvals a change like that would actually require.
4. Learned that a two-payee structure was administratively possible but required both beneficiaries' written agreement and updated banking information on file, which meant Raymond's active cooperation was unavoidable regardless of what the will said on its own. That shaped the whole negotiation strategy around securing his cooperation early through a workable proposal, rather than opening with the threat of litigation he could simply wait out.
5. Opened direct negotiations with Raymond's own lawyer rather than relying on informal phone calls that had already gone nowhere, presenting the will's terms plainly and proposing the manufacturer's two-payee option as a clean, low-conflict way to satisfy everyone's obligations without a fresh dispute erupting over each quarterly payment going forward, and set a realistic deadline for a written response before considering other options.
6. Negotiated a compromise on the split itself, since Raymond, while ultimately willing to cooperate, argued that a portion of Sunita's share should account for a small debt Gita had informally forgiven him years earlier. That claim had some genuine basis in Gita's old bank records, and conceding part of it, rather than contesting the point outright, was worth doing to close the matter without the cost and delay of contested litigation.
7. Documented the final arrangement in writing with both Sunita and Raymond signing off on the adjusted percentage split, then submitted it to the manufacturer along with the formal notice their licensing department required, so the account could be restructured on proper authorization rather than an informal handshake that either side could later walk back once the goodwill of settlement wore off.
8. Confirmed with the manufacturer that the new split would remain in place for the life of the royalty stream, not just the current payment cycle, and obtained written confirmation of that from the licensing department directly, so Sunita would not have to renegotiate, resubmit paperwork, or reapply every time a new quarterly payment came due for as long as the patent kept earning.

The outcome

The manufacturer restructured the royalty account roughly four months after Gita's death, splitting payments directly between Sunita and Raymond going forward. Sunita's share ended up at forty percent of the royalty income rather than the fifty percent the will specified, the concession made to resolve Raymond's claim about the old informal debt without a drawn-out dispute over an issue that was genuinely arguable both ways.

It was not the full outcome the will promised, and Sunita said plainly that she felt the reduction was not entirely fair, given that Gita had never mentioned any debt forgiveness to her directly. But it was a real, enforceable, ongoing income stream, paid quarterly and independent of Raymond's goodwill, which is what mattered most practically. The quarterly amount, in the low thousands, was modest but steady, and Sunita no longer had to depend on Raymond choosing to send her a share each time a payment arrived.

The four months it took to reach that point were not easy ones for Sunita, who had no royalty income at all while the negotiation ran, on top of losing the caregiving income she had relied on for over a decade. What the negotiated split avoided was worse: an open dispute with Raymond that could have dragged on far longer, cost more in legal fees than the disputed ten percent was worth, and left Sunita with nothing while it played out. Both sides, in the end, could live with the result, even if neither considered it a full victory.

Sunita has since gone back to full-time administrative work, treating the royalty payments as a supplement rather than her main income, which is closer to how Gita likely meant it to function in the first place. She and Raymond do not speak often, but the account runs on its own now, without either of them needing to coordinate anything each quarter, which Sunita said was, in its own quiet way, more valuable than the missing ten percent.

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