Chapter 4: We are the Champions
By the time Donald and his son Craig brought in a new lawyer, Robert Sawers, the legal landscape was already tilted in their favor. The plaintiffs had tripped over the very first hurdle — standing — and no amount of legal acrobatics could change the fact that the claim had been fatally defective from day one.
Sawers understood this immediately. He filed for a jury trial, not because Donald and Craig needed one, but as a strategic safeguard. With a jury trial in play, procedural rights became locked in, and the defendants could hold firm on their advantage.
Then came the decisive move: a Rule 129 Application to have the lawsuit dismissed outright.
The grounds were blunt and unambiguous. The action was frivolous, vexatious, and an abuse of the court’s process because the plaintiffs, acting in their personal capacities, had no legal right to sue over estate property.
The application did not stand on rhetoric alone. Sawers anchored it in case law, pointing to Mugford v. Mugford, a Newfoundland Court of Appeal decision that struck down a nearly identical type of claim. In that ruling, the court had made it crystal clear:
“It is the role of the administrator and not the role of [a sibling] to put this to the test… The action was wrongly conceived… and ought not to have proceeded.”
The principle was simple. Only the estate’s legally appointed Personal Representative could sue on its behalf. The plaintiffs in Donald’s case had started the lawsuit without one. By law, that was the end of it.