Probate Isn't the Hard Part. The Hold Music Is.

You know the sound. A few bars of something instrumental, on loop, occasionally interrupted by a recording that assures you your call is important. Nobody expects that sound to become part of grieving. But for a lot of families, it does.

We recently came across a letter from Richard, a wills-and-estates lawyer at LLDG, an Etobicoke law firm that's been open since 1949. Richard writes a quarterly letter to clients called What Comes Next, and this one wasn't really about the law. It was about what happened after his own father died — and about a piece of advice he'd been giving clients for years that turned out to be only half true.

The advice that was true, and the part it left out

For years, Richard's standard line to grieving spouses went something like this: when the first spouse passes and the house and bank accounts are jointly owned, there usually isn't much for a lawyer to do. Check the beneficiary designations, file a survivorship application, done. The legal file closes fast.

That part is still true. What Richard didn't fully appreciate — until he was the one helping his mother through it — is that the lawyer's job ending is exactly where everyone else's job begins. And "everyone else," it turns out, mostly means whoever answers the phone at the bank, the insurance company, and the phone company.

Where the hold music actually comes from

Richard kept a list while he helped his mother sort out his father's affairs. It kept growing. Bank accounts. Beneficiary forms. Bills that still needed to be paid, on time, by someone who had just lost her husband. Life insurance, home insurance, car insurance — three companies, three phone calls, three different sets of required documents, three separate identity-verification processes, because apparently grief is not a valid form of ID.

The Bell account, he noted, took longer to sort out than the actual survivorship application. Days longer. The legal system moved faster than the phone company. That's not a knock on lawyers — it's the whole point of the letter. Probate wrapped up in the time it took to get a human being at Bell to update an account name.

There was one bank account small enough that they agreed to waive probate entirely. Which sounds like a win, until you realize "waived" still meant trips to the branch, appointments with advisors, and a genuinely absurd number of forms — including one that required Richard to confirm his mother's middle name, his father's date of death, and that the family was not, to the best of his knowledge, laundering money or financing terrorism.

None of that is legal work. All of it is work. And it almost always lands on the person who is least equipped to do it, in the exact weeks they're least equipped to do anything — usually while on hold.

Why this sounds so familiar to us

If you've ever helped a parent downsize, or sold a house as part of settling an estate, this probably isn't news to you — it's Tuesday. We spend a lot of our time with Etobicoke and Mississauga families in exactly this fog: sorting through fifty years of belongings, figuring out which forms actually matter, and trying to make one enormous decision (what happens to the house) while a dozen smaller ones (whose name is on the hydro bill?) are also demanding attention, on hold, on speakerphone, on a Tuesday afternoon.

The house itself is often the biggest item on that list, and also, oddly, the one people feel most paralyzed about. Everything else is a phone call — a long one. The house is a decision.

"Baby Steps"

Richard's father taught him to deal with things with patience and humour, and somewhere around form number fourteen, he found himself repeating a line he says to clients constantly — borrowed, fittingly, from What About Bob? — "baby steps." One form. One phone call. One room. Not the whole house in a weekend.

It's good advice for probate. It's equally good advice for the part we help with. Nobody needs to empty a fifty-year-old basement in one heroic Saturday, and nobody needs to decide what the house is worth before they've figured out where the will even is.

The useful part

If you're in this stage right now, or you can see it coming for a parent, a few things worth knowing:

A joint account or jointly owned home usually doesn't require probate — but "doesn't require probate" is not the same as "doesn't require paperwork." Expect the insurance companies and utilities to be the slow part, not the lawyer. Budget your patience accordingly.

Start a single list — one page, physical or digital — the day you begin. Every account, every login, every phone number you called and what they asked for. You will use it more than you expect, and you will be very glad you're not doing it from memory on hold call number nine.

And when it's time to deal with the house — whether that's now or six months from now — you don't have to figure out the real estate part alone while you're still on hold with the phone company. That's genuinely the part we're good at, and it can wait until you're ready for it.

If your family is somewhere in the middle of this right now, we're happy to talk it through — no forms, no fourteen phone calls, and we'll tell you what things cost before we start.

Source material
Original letter: "What Comes Next," a quarterly letter from LLDG (Etobicoke law firm, operating since 1949), Fall 2026, Issue 1, signed by Richard.