I did a little research into Justice Slattery’s background after reading his judgment, on Wednesday, in the case of siblings contesting their father’s will and an estate of more than $2 million.

It was Leo Tolstoy who wrote the famous opening line in the novel Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Justice Slattery was set the task of delivering a just outcome for a particularly unhappy family, in a legal case that has so far cost more than $220,000, left one sibling as the biggest loser, and has included a tirade in court described by the judge as “an obscene and vitriolic rant” from one sibling to the other.

And if you’re thinking a court is the best place to deal with family animosity when it reaches this point, consider the following. As we speak the warring siblings – or more correctly their legal representatives after taking instructions – are negotiating who pays the legal bills, of $120,000 by the losing party, and $100,000 by the siblings who won.

Those bills were racked up because of a three-day hearing and “were within the range of what is reasonable”, Justice Slattery found.

I, personally, could think of better ways to blow $220,000.

But the real reason why you should try to mediate contested wills, rather than have them determined in court, is because court guarantees one thing – your unhappy family’s unhappiness is revealed for the world to see.

Here’s what Justice Slattery said in his judgment on Wednesday: “The Court warned the parties several times during these proceedings that the findings in this case, whatever its outcome, would be unlikely to make comfortable reading for any of them or for any of their acquaintances.

“The Court made clear that its findings in the proceedings would be available on the Internet and that one of the advantages of a consensual resolution of the proceedings was that such public findings would not have to be made.

“Despite those warnings, the proceedings did not resolve. The Court now has to determine them. The (Blank) family history recited here could have been saved from public disclosure. But there was insufficient family cooperation to prevent even that outcome.”

I’ve called them the Blank family although the real name appears in the judgment. The siblings’ names are John, Peter and Nancy. John lost.

The judgment is lengthy. It goes into the Blank family history, including the 50-year marriage of the siblings’ parents, the mother’s death in 2009 and the father’s death in 2014.

It would be fair to say the Blank family history is not pretty and John, the eldest son, was blamed by both his parents and siblings as the source of a lot of the problems.

Justice Slattery – the man who had to listen to three days of evidence about the warring Blanks, and wade through presumably hundreds of pages of affidavits and submissions – was not impressed with the evidence of any of the siblings.

“All of their evidence was profoundly distorted by their personal prejudices, born out of an unquenchable feud that Nancy and Peter had on the one side and John had on the other side, which they seemed determined to maintain and bring into the courtroom. This distorted their evidence in different ways,” Justice Slattery found.

He found John “badly misrepresents the past, and airbrushes his own grave misconduct out of the family history”, while Nancy ignored court warnings and launched at least one “obscene and vitriolic rant” against him. Peter “seemed resistant to, or suspicious of, the whole Court process”, Justice Slattery found.

The judgment goes into some detail about what happened at the mother’s funeral in 2009, where Nancy and Peter engaged security guards to “keep watch over John and obstruct his freedom of action at the funeral”.

There were no security guards in 2014 at the father’s funeral, but there was also no mention of John as one of the father’s children, and a Mass book at the service named only Nancy, Peter and their deceased youngest sibling Angela.

During the hearing Justice Slattery tried to get to the source of some of the siblings’ animosity. Some of it related to John’s “sense of entitlement” over his sisters’ lives, and a decades-old grievance against Nancy over a relationship she had with a man.

“One might have thought in many families that what Nancy did in her personal life when she was a teenager might have faded into insignificance. But not with John,” the judge found.

Nancy’s sense of hurt after being “lectured and tortured” by John for years was “well justified”, he found. But Nancy and Peter tried to exclude any contact between John and their parents after 2002.

In his will the Blank father left his estate to Nancy and Peter, and excluded John.

The test for contesting a will includes an assessment of the financial position claimants are in. John’s assets were assessed at $5 million. His siblings were less financially secure, and could also claim strong support of their parents in their final years. Justice Slattery gave a fairly strong hint that John’s $120,000 legal bill, and Nancy and Peter’s $100,000 bill should all be paid by the estate. 

John lost, but in the end and over decades, they all did.