No Will, Two Young Children, and a Father's Business Claim

The situation

Bohdan was 45, ran a mid-size construction company out of North York, and had never gotten around to writing a will. He and Natalia, a surgeon, had been married for eleven years and had two children, ages six and nine. He collapsed at a job site one afternoon and died of a sudden cardiac arrest before paramedics arrived. There was no warning, no diagnosis, no time to plan.

Natalia came to us two weeks later, still in shock, holding a folder of documents she didn't fully understand: incorporation papers for the company, a mortgage statement for the family home, investment account summaries, and no will anywhere. She needed to know who was legally in charge of her husband's affairs, what her children were entitled to, and what to do about a company that still had payroll to make and crews waiting on direction.

Complicating things further, Bohdan's father, Winston, a semi-retired contractor who had helped Bohdan start the company years earlier, still held a minority ownership stake in it — and told Natalia, gently but firmly, that he was also owed a substantial loan he'd made to the business two years before his son died.

What the intestacy rules meant for the family

When someone dies without a will in Ontario, they are said to have died "intestate," and the Succession Law Reform Act supplies a fixed formula for who inherits, regardless of what the deceased might have wanted. There is no discretion to honour an unwritten wish or a family understanding — the formula applies exactly as written.

For a spouse and more than one child, that formula works in two steps. First, the surviving spouse receives a preferential share — a fixed dollar amount set by provincial regulation, off the top, before anything else is divided. Second, whatever is left after that preferential share is split: the spouse takes one third, and the two children share the remaining two thirds equally between them.

The family home was held jointly between Natalia and Bohdan, so it passed to her automatically by right of survivorship and never entered the estate calculation at all — one piece of good fortune buried in a difficult month. But everything else Bohdan owned in his own name did fall into the intestate estate: his majority ownership stake in the construction company, his personal investment accounts, and a vehicle. Once the home was set aside, the estate subject to the intestacy formula came to roughly $2.7 million, most of it tied up in the value of his 65 percent interest in the company.

Two things made this more than a straightforward arithmetic exercise. First, because the children were minors, their two-thirds share of the residue could not simply be handed to them — Ontario law requires a minor's inheritance to be held in trust until they reach the age of majority, with the Office of the Children's Lawyer, a government body that protects the financial interests of minors in estate matters, entitled to review the arrangement. Second, Winston's 35 percent ownership stake in the company was never part of Bohdan's estate at all — it belonged to Winston outright — but his claim that the company owed him roughly $450,000 for an earlier loan absolutely was a claim against the estate, and if valid, it would come off the top of the estate's value before any of the intestacy formula applied.

What we did

1. Helped Natalia apply to become estate trustee. With no will, there was no named executor, so Natalia needed to apply to the Superior Court for a certificate of appointment of estate trustee without a will before she had legal authority to access accounts, sign for the company, or act on the estate's behalf. We prepared that application and the required notice to Bohdan's other next of kin, including Winston.
2. Commissioned an independent valuation of the company. With Winston as a minority owner and a disputed loan on the table, an arm's-length business valuation was essential — both to establish what Bohdan's 65 percent stake was actually worth and to give both sides a neutral number to negotiate around, rather than competing guesses.
3. Pressure-tested Winston's loan claim. Winston had no signed loan agreement, only a handful of emails referencing money transferred into the company's account and a general understanding that it would be repaid. We requested the company's banking records and accounting entries from around the time of the alleged loan to see what the paper trail actually supported.
4. Opened a dialogue instead of a court application. A contested claim against an estate can be litigated, but that typically takes well over a year and erodes the value everyone is fighting over in legal costs. We proposed a negotiated resolution to Winston's lawyer early, while the company still had operational momentum worth protecting.
5. Structured the children's inheritance properly. We worked with an accountant to set up a formal testamentary trust to hold the children's combined share, with defined terms for how funds could be used for their care and education before they reached the age where they'd receive their inheritance outright, and provided the required disclosure to the Office of the Children's Lawyer.
6. Arranged a share buyout structure for the business. Rather than leaving Winston and a minors' trust as co-owners of an active construction company indefinitely — an arrangement almost no operating business can function under — we negotiated terms for Natalia's side of the estate to buy out Winston's ownership stake over time, funded partly from company earnings rather than a single lump sum.

The outcome

The banking records only partly supported Winston's claim. They showed two transfers into the company totalling roughly $180,000, not the $450,000 he remembered, and nothing in writing describing the money as a loan rather than a contribution. After several rounds of negotiation, Winston agreed to accept $180,000 as full repayment, tied to the documented transfers, and dropped the larger claim.

On the ownership side, the independent valuation put fair value on Winston's 35 percent stake at approximately $980,000. Rather than a single payout the company couldn't absorb, the parties agreed to a structured buyout over three years, funded from company profits, with Winston stepping back from any operational role but retaining a modest advisory arrangement he valued personally.

Once the loan repayment and buyout terms were fixed, the intestate estate settled at just over $2.5 million. Natalia received her preferential share plus one third of the residue; the children's two-thirds share, a little over $1.5 million combined, went into the trust structure we'd set up, administered by Natalia as trustee under terms reviewed by the Office of the Children's Lawyer, with funds released for their care and education until each reaches the age their share is paid out in full.

It took just under a year from Bohdan's death to a fully settled estate — slower than Natalia had hoped, but realistic for an estate involving a disputed claim, a business valuation, and minor beneficiaries. Neither side got everything they wanted. Winston recovered less than he believed he was owed and gave up his ownership stake on a timeline, not immediately. Natalia kept control of the company and the family's financial stability, but only after months of negotiation, legal costs the estate had to absorb, and a settlement that fell short of what a court might theoretically have awarded had every claim gone entirely her way. It was a compromise both sides could live with, reached without the company losing a construction season to litigation.

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