Siblings Challenge a Will Signed Six Weeks Before Their Mother Died

The situation

Miriam, an administrative assistant, and her brother Amrit, a long-haul truck driver, had always assumed their mother's estate would be split evenly between them. She had told them so for years, and a will drafted a decade earlier said exactly that. Their mother lived on her own in Windsor into her early eighties, managing her finances and her modest bungalow without much help from either child, since Amrit's work kept him on the road for weeks at a time and Miriam lived across the city with her own young family.

That changed in her final year. A diagnosis of vascular dementia came after a fall, and within months a home-care worker named Harpreet, hired through an agency to help with meals and errands, had become a near-constant presence in the house. Miriam noticed her mother seemed more withdrawn on visits, and phone calls started going unanswered during the hours Harpreet was there. Six weeks before their mother died, she signed a new will at a lawyer's office, driven there by Harpreet, leaving almost the entire estate — roughly $450,000 once the house and savings were counted — to Harpreet, with only a token amount left to each of her children.

What the review found

Miriam brought the new will to Treadstone Law within weeks of the funeral, after the estate's proposed executor, Harpreet, applied to the Superior Court for a certificate of appointment confirming the will as valid. Our team's first step was to pull together the medical picture: family doctor records, the notes from the fall that led to the dementia diagnosis, and pharmacy records showing a steep increase in medication for confusion and agitation in the months before the will was signed.

The picture that emerged was troubling. In Ontario, a person making a will needs testamentary capacity — they must understand, at the time they sign, the extent of what they own, who might reasonably expect to benefit, and the effect of the document they are signing. The medical records showed cognitive testing scores that had dropped sharply in the year before the new will, including an assessment just two months prior that flagged significant impairment in memory and decision-making. There was no record of anyone assessing her capacity specifically for the purpose of making a new will — the drafting lawyer's file, obtained through a request for the wills file, showed a single half-hour meeting with Harpreet waiting in the reception area throughout.

Ontario law also recognizes a related but separate problem: undue influence, where a will reflects someone else's wishes rather than the testator's own, imposed through pressure, isolation, or dependency rather than genuine persuasion. Several features of the case pointed that way beyond the capacity concerns alone. Harpreet had arranged the appointment, provided transportation, and was named not only as the main beneficiary but as executor. Contact between the mother and both her children had visibly thinned out in the same period the relationship with Harpreet deepened. None of this proved undue influence on its own, but together with the capacity evidence, it was enough to raise what the law calls suspicious circumstances — and once that threshold is met, the burden shifts: the person seeking to uphold the will has to prove the testator had capacity and truly understood and approved its contents, rather than the challengers having to disprove it.

What we did

1. Filed a notice of objection with the Superior Court. This stopped the certificate of appointment from being issued while the will's validity was in dispute, and required Harpreet, as the person propounding the will, to prove it formally rather than simply have it accepted.
2. Gathered the full medical and drafting file. We requested the mother's complete health records for the eighteen months before her death, including the cognitive assessments, medication history, and any notes from her family doctor about confusion or memory concerns raised by neighbours or home-care staff. We also obtained the drafting lawyer's file under the rules that apply once a will is challenged, since a solicitor's notes are not protected from the beneficiaries in that situation.
3. Retained a geriatric psychiatrist to review the file. Rather than rely on lay observations, we had a qualified expert assess the medical records against the legal test for capacity as of the date the will was signed. The opinion concluded it was unlikely she had the required understanding at that time.
4. Interviewed the drafting lawyer and home-care agency staff. Statements from two other caregivers who had worked shifts in the home described a woman who was frequently disoriented about the day or the names of visitors — evidence that had never made it into any court filing before we asked for it.
5. Pursued mediation before trial. With the medical opinion, the drafting file, and witness statements assembled, we proposed mediation rather than proceeding straight to a trial that would have taken a year or more and cost the estate heavily in legal costs on both sides. Mediation in will challenges is common in Ontario and lets both sides test their case with a neutral mediator before committing to the expense of trial.

The outcome

At mediation, faced with the psychiatrist's report and the drafting file showing no independent capacity assessment had ever been done, Harpreet's lawyer advised there was little prospect of the later will being upheld at trial. Harpreet agreed to have the later will set aside entirely. Because the later will was never validly made, it had never actually revoked the one before it — so the ten-year-old will naming Miriam and Amrit as equal beneficiaries continued to govern the estate after all.

The estate, once the house was sold and the modest debts and funeral costs were paid, worked out to roughly $430,000, split evenly between the siblings as their mother had always intended. Harpreet kept a small personal item specifically bequeathed in the earlier will — a keepsake, not a share of the estate — and stepped aside as executor. The process from the notice of objection to the mediated settlement took just under a year, faster than a contested estate trial typically runs, largely because the medical evidence was strong enough that neither side wanted to gamble on a trial outcome.

For Miriam and Amrit, the resolution meant more than the money. Having the earlier will reinstated confirmed, formally, that their mother's true wishes — the ones she had expressed consistently for a decade — were the ones that counted in the end.

What you can learn from this