The Digital Estate: How Probate Has Changed Over the Years

When I began my career as a trainee solicitor with PG McMahon Solicitors in 1994, the practice of drafting wills looked very different from today.

In fact, it was several years before I had my own computer in the office. In those early days, the legal secretaries were the privileged ones — they had the PCs. The humble trainee solicitor did not enjoy such technological luxuries. If a will or document needed to be produced, it generally passed through the capable hands of the secretarial staff.

Truth be told, I wasn't particularly keen on getting a computer at the time either. It was only through the encouragement — and perhaps a little pressure — from my master, the founder of the firm, the late Garry McMahon, that I eventually relented and got one.

Looking back now, I'm very glad he insisted.

Once I embraced the technology, I never looked back.

Estate planning at that time was also far more straightforward in terms of the types of assets involved. Wills generally dealt with the traditional assets of the era:

• The family home
• Farmland or other property
• Bank accounts
• Shares or savings certificates
• Personal belongings

There was no such thing as social media, cloud storage, cryptocurrency, or online trading platforms. The idea that a person's estate might include assets existing only online would have seemed quite extraordinary.

The emergence of the "digital estate"

Fast forward to today, and the landscape of estate administration has changed significantly.

A modern estate may now include assets such as:

• Online banking and payment accounts
• Cryptocurrency wallets
• Email accounts
• Social media profiles
• Online investment platforms
• Cloud storage containing photographs or important documents
• Subscription services and digital purchases

In many cases, families may not even realise these accounts exist.

The practical difficulty for executors

Unlike traditional assets, digital assets often lack a clear paper trail, making access dependent on passwords or two-factor authentication, which can hinder executors significantly.

For example:

• Cryptocurrency may be completely inaccessible without the private key.
• Photographs stored in the cloud could be lost permanently if no one has the login details.
• Online subscriptions may continue charging long after death if the executor is unaware of them.

A new consideration in estate planning

As more of our financial and personal lives move online, digital assets are becoming a very real issue in probate practice.

From a practical perspective, it is increasingly sensible for individuals to consider:

• keeping a secure record of digital accounts
• ensuring executors know where key information can be found
• leaving clear instructions regarding digital assets

How much the profession has changed

Looking back to 1994, when trainee solicitors like myself relied on the office secretaries' computers and on wills mostly concerned with physical assets, it is remarkable how much both technology and estate planning have evolved.

Yet the core purpose of a will remains exactly the same: to ensure that a person's affairs can be properly and efficiently administered after their death.

The difference today is that those affairs may now extend well beyond the traditional assets into a digital world that simply did not exist when many of us first entered practice.

A simple question worth asking: If something happened tomorrow, would your executor even know your digital assets existed?