What Good Estate Trustee Work Looks Like, According to Katherine Kimel
The role sounds simple until it isn't. An estate trustee has to gather assets, pay debts, and distribute what's left to beneficiaries. On paper, that's a short list. In practice, it can take months of accounting, real estate sales, tax filings, and conversations with people who are grieving and sometimes suspicious of each other. Ontario families often name a trustee without discussing what the job actually involves, then discover the gap once someone has died.
Katherine Kimel is the founder and principal lawyer of Kimel Law Group, a Toronto firm that works on estate litigation, estate administration, and guardianship matters across Ontario. Because the firm sees estates after something has gone wrong, it has a clear view of where trustees tend to struggle and what separates administration that goes smoothly from administration that ends up in court.
What a trustee is actually responsible for
An estate trustee owes duties to the estate and its beneficiaries, not to their own convenience. That means:
Locating and securing estate assets, from bank accounts to property to personal belongings.
Paying valid debts and taxes before making any distributions.
Keeping records of every transaction, not just a summary at the end.
Treating all beneficiaries fairly, even ones the trustee does not get along with.
Distributing the estate according to the will, or according to Ontario's intestacy rules if there is no will.
None of this requires a law degree. It does require organization and a willingness to document decisions as they happen, not reconstruct them later from memory.
Where trustees run into trouble
Kimel Law Group notes that most estate disputes it sees do not start with a badly written will. They start with a trustee who delayed, communicated poorly, or made a decision without asking whether it was theirs to make.
Delay without explanation: Beneficiaries generally understand that estates take time. What frustrates them is silence. A trustee who goes quiet for months, even for good reasons like a slow property sale, invites suspicion. Regular, plain updates cost little and prevent a lot.
Mixing personal and estate money: Even short-term transfers between an estate account and a trustee's own account can look like misappropriation, whether or not anything improper happened. Estate funds belong in a separate account from day one.
Treating "I was named trustee" as the end of the analysis: Being named in a will does not mean a trustee can act alone on every decision. Some steps, like certain asset sales or handling contested claims, benefit from legal advice before the trustee commits to a course of action. Waiting until a beneficiary objects is more expensive than asking early.
Uneven treatment of beneficiaries: A trustee who is also a beneficiary has to resist the urge to prioritize their own interests, or even the appearance of it. Perceived favoritism is one of the fastest routes to a formal complaint or a court application.
What good administration looks like
Kimel Law Group points to a few habits that consistently separate estates that close without incident from ones that end up contested.
Clear records from the start: A trustee should keep a running account of assets, debts, and expenses, not wait until year-end to reconstruct it. This is what a passing of accounts will eventually ask for, and building it early saves time later.
Communication on a schedule, not on demand: Beneficiaries who get periodic updates are less likely to escalate. They may still disagree with decisions, but they are less likely to assume something is being hidden.
Getting advice before a decision, not after a complaint: Trustees are allowed to seek legal guidance, and estates typically bear that cost. Asking a question early is usually far less expensive than defending a decision after the fact.
Knowing when to step back: Not every named trustee should serve. Family conflict, a demanding personal schedule, or simple unfamiliarity with the role are legitimate reasons to decline or resign before problems start, rather than muddling through.
Why this matters for beneficiaries too
Beneficiaries are not passive in this process. They have the right to ask for an accounting, to raise concerns about delay, and in some cases to apply to the court to compel a trustee to account for their conduct. Kimel Law Group's litigation work often begins exactly there: a beneficiary who asked reasonable questions and did not get answers.
Katherine Kimel's view is that most of these disputes are avoidable with earlier, plainer communication between trustees and beneficiaries. The legal issues in a contested estate are often secondary to a breakdown in basic information sharing that happened months before anyone called a lawyer.
A short checklist for new trustees
Anyone named as an estate trustee in Ontario can reduce their own risk by doing a few things immediately:
Open a dedicated estate bank account before touching any funds.
Get certified copies of the death certificate and locate the original will.
Make a list of assets and debts as they're discovered, with dates.
Tell beneficiaries what to expect and roughly when, even if the timeline is uncertain.
Ask a lawyer before making any decision that could be disputed later, particularly around asset sales or unequal treatment among beneficiaries.
None of this guarantees a dispute-free estate. Families carry history into these situations that no checklist can resolve. But the trustees who follow a structure like this tend to spend less time explaining themselves and more time actually finishing the job.
