Almost five years ago we posted a blog article titled Substantial Compliance – Be Careful What You Wish For (insert link). It forecast that with the sweeping changes effective January 1, 2022, lawyers would have a field day in submitting documents in the loosest form before the court and asking that they be validated by the court. The blog article of December 2021, forecast that what this will do is to permit people to ignore the law and allow lawyers to earn significant fees attempting to make the proverbial silk purse out of a sow’s ear. There is no better example then the recent Ontario Superior Court August 2026 decision by the very learned and detail-oriented Justice Sanfilippo in Chang v. Chang. Mr. Chang was literally on his death bed and wrote out in a crude fashion what he wanted to happen to his significant estate on the back of a car rental reservation print out. It was neither signed nor dated and met neither the formal requirements of a proper Will or even a holographic aka Handwritten Will permitted under The Succession Law Reform Act. Even though none of the parties potentially entitled to share in the large estate were contesting the matter, significant fees and a tremendous effort had to be expended to come to a conclusion. Investigators had to be hired to find and locate the one estranged child of the deceased. The siblings of the of the unmarried willmaker had to be located and they had to take a position on the lawsuit. Someone had to be appointed as the estate trustee during litigation, in other words the temporary executor, while this matter was sorted out before the court. Then we have the significant legal fees that had to be incurred to get the matter to the point that the court was able to make a decision. It is uncertain to the author as to why the family could not have reached their own agreement as to how the deceased’s estate would be divided. One of the family members could have applied stating with some validity that there was no Will and accordingly there was an intestacy and the matter could have been divided in accordance with the terms of The Succession Law Reform Act. In other words, on paper all of the money would have gone to the deceased’s daughter and she along with the other family members could have agreed amongst themselves with varying degrees of formality as to how the estate was to be divided.
Returning to the blog article of five years ago, this is all wonderful from the perspective of Wills and Estate Lawyers and Estate Litigation lawyers. While on its surface this may seem to be a more humane way of dealing with estates, it is simply encouraging everyone to pursue the pennywise pound-foolish school of estate planning.
