EDMONTON – An Edmonton man is sharing his experience making changes to his will so others know they have options.
“I got what I wanted, but the long way around.”
Eighty-year-old Glenn Malcolm wanted to remove his nephew from his will, after the 64-year-old passed away unexpectedly.
“I didn’t want anything much changed, just taking off that one spot, so that there would never be any problems with it,” he explains.
Malcolm had a previous will with his wife, in which he left some of his estate to his nephew. That will was about 15-years-old.
“I went back to the same law office where I had been before and they referred me.”
He was referred to a different lawyer within the same firm.
Malcolm says he told the lawyer what he wanted to do and she advised him to create a new will.
“’Oh no, you can’t just remove this one person on here like that, you have to make a whole complete new will. Your wife is already dead now, so her will was gone,’ and this and that,” he recalls.
“So I said ‘go ahead.’”
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The new will cost Malcolm $630.
“I thought, ‘this is ridiculous.’ I didn’t have more than 15, 20 minutes in there, I don’t think.”
It wasn’t until he brought up the situation with his son-in-law that he realized a change like removing one person from the will doesn’t necessarily mean you have to draft an new document from scratch.
“The primary option is to do something called a codicil,” explains Matthew Feehan, a Wills and Estates lawyer with Feehan Law Officer. “Once you have your original will done, over the course of time, you might want to consider doing this kind of document… it’s basically a change or an amendment to a will.”
For example, Feehan says if you named one of your brothers as executor of your will and then that brother passed away or moved out of your jurisdiction, you could change the executor to your other brother by using a codicil.
“If you’re making some minor changes to your will that’s already done you can do that through a basic codicil for about $100 or thereabouts. But, if you’re making several changes to your will, and if you’re concerned that it might be confusing – because these two documents have to be read together and they have to make sense – so if it’s going to be confusing in any way, I would recommend just redoing the thing from scratch.”
In this case, the only change Malcolm wanted to make was removing his nephew as a recipient to part of his estate in the case of his death.
While Feehan doesn’t know the specific details of this particular case, he believes there may have been some miscommunication between Malcolm and his lawyer.
“I think that there was a misunderstanding,” he says. “It’s a fact that codicils are readily done and readily available to citizens who want that. So if a person wants a basic change to a will, that’s the starting ground; you go and look at doing a codicil.”
Global News contacted Malcolm’s law firm but has yet to receive a response.
Feehan encourages people to do a bit of research, compare lawyers, and pick one who is right for them. He also says you don’t have to use the same lawyer or law firm that drafted the original will for you.
“No citizen is required to have any dealing with any lawyer who drafted the will. They can go to any other lawyer for a codicil, or they can go to any other law firm for a probate application because they own that will, not the lawyer, and not the law firm.”
Feehan adds there are steps one can take to avoid the need for any alterations to a will altogether.
“There’s a way to avoid codicils in the first place, and that’s by having alternates when you do your first will.”
Malcolm just hopes other people will do a little bit of homework on wills – and how to modify them – before they make any final decisions.
“Check it out a little more closely than what I did. I just walked in there like a farm boy, and ‘gotcha’.”
“Even if I don’t get anything back – which I wouldn’t mind doing – it might save somebody else a whole bunch of trouble, because that was completely unnecessary.”
Feehan agrees that discussing wills is important, and a process that too many people tend to avoid.
“They don’t want to talk about the subject matter – it’s not particularly pleasant – but it’s the reality of life that we have to deal with these kinds of questions.”
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