Maura Curran Law — Blog — Thursday, August 6, 2026
A will wouldn’t have stopped people from having feelings about who Prince was to them. It would have stopped the legal fight about it.
A will does one job: it names who’s in charge and who inherits, in writing, before anyone has to guess. An executor named in the document could have started administering Prince’s estate within weeks of his death — no court process to identify potential heirs from scratch, no paternity tests, no six-year search for who legally qualified as family. The document does that work in advance, so a courtroom doesn’t have to do it after the fact. In Florida, a straightforward estate with a valid will can often close within eight to twelve months. Prince’s took six years —not because Minnesota’s laws are dramatically different, but because there was nothing on paper to anchor a single decision to.
A will also would have answered the one question that consumed years of litigation: who actually inherits. Six siblings and half-siblings ended up splitting what was left of the estate —not necessarily because that’s what Prince wanted, but because that’s what the law defaults to when nobody says otherwise. A will could have sent the estate anywhere: a foundation, a charity, one person, none of his blood relatives at all. Prince never got to make that choice. The state of Minnesota made it for him, by default, the moment he died without a plan.
That’s the entire function of a will — not sentiment, not control from beyond the grave. Just clarity, put down on paper while there was still time to write it.
That’s not really a story about a famous musician. That’s a story about what happens to anyone who assumes there’s more time. The size of the estate changes the number of lawyers in the room. It doesn’t change the outcome — no plan means someone else, someone who never knew you, ends up deciding what happens next.
