Last summer, I blogged about Hassan Rasouli, who had been in a near-vegetative state since contracting an infection after surgery in October 2010. His doctors had intended to remove life support against the wishes of his wife, who was named as his attorney in Mr....
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Estate Planning
Choose your own executor
I reference Gerry Beyer's Wills, Trusts & Estates Prof Blog a lot because he has so much good stuff there. I've had this one in the back of my mind for several months and finally have the chance to post it. Gerry wrote back in November about a checklist for...
Protecting a disabled beneficiary
I see many clients who have children with medical conditions, most often varying degrees of autism, that will make it very difficult for them to manage their finances in the future. For these clients, there is a very specific type of trust that I put into their wills...
Email from the grave
In case you needed another reason to ensure your email gets shut down after your death, check out this story about a woman whose email account was hacked two years after her death, following which the hacker started spamming everyone in her address book. Most webmail...
Time for some economy
The New York Times published an article a little while ago about how the economic downturn has led to a rise in less expensive burial options. According to the Times, cremation has moved from almost nonexistent 50 years ago to the norm, encompassing over 40% of all...
Beware of flying objects
My friend, Sean Bawden, is a lawyer in Ottawa. Last year, he wrote a guest post for a friend's blog called "Who do you sue for damages after the zombie apocalypse?" It was a highly entertaining read, especially the section on possibly suing the estate of the zombie. I...
Do you have a will?
If you have a will, you fall into the minority. It’s a pretty exclusive club: according to a survey done by RocketLawyer in the U.S., 57% of Americans have no wills; most likely these statistics hold true for Canadians as well. Even more interesting is some of the...
Putting your money where your mouth is
I read this article a while ago about Joseph Flom, a lawyer at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meaghar & Flom LLP in New York who grew up very humbly, and built his firm into a global company with 24 offices around the world (including one in Toronto). When he died in...
Protecting the black sheep
The Globe and Mail ran an article in the fall about leaving unequal gifts to different children. Sometimes, when I help clients with this type of situation, I draft the reasoning behind the unequal distribution right into the will so that there is no confusion as to...
Disinheritance
There has been a fair bit in the news lately about children challenging wills because they were partially or entirely disinherited. In some jurisdictions, particularly British Columbia, it is very difficult to entirely remove a child from a will because of moral...