Sometimes, finding the will changes everything – even when it doesn’t change who inherits.

In this case, my client was appointed administrator of his late mother’s estate after no will could be found. Under Virginia intestacy law, the estate would pass equally to her two children – my client and his sister.

Within weeks, the sister hired an attorney and began making increasingly aggressive demands: access to the home, accusations of missing property, even plans to stay in the house overnight. Despite the administrator having allowed her lawyer full access to photograph everything inside, tensions escalated to the point that both law offices sent associates to supervise the sister’s visit, with the client’s daughter acting as mediator – and the Police Department on standby, just in case.

A few days after that supervised visit, a will was found.

The will didn’t change the ultimate distribution – the two siblings still share the estate equally – but it changed everything else about the administration. As executor, our client now has clear legal authority to:

– Sell real property without petitioning the court for power of sale (a privilege administrators don’t automatically have under Virginia law); and

– Control the division of tangible personal property, thanks to a clause giving the executor absolute discretion to divide or sell items and distribute the proceeds.

The discovery of that single document transformed the case overnight – shifting control from an anxious, contested intestate administration to an orderly, testate process governed by the decedent’s own words.

The moral? Leave a will. Even if it doesn’t change who inherits, it changes everything about how smoothly your estate is handled and how peacefully your family can move forward.