Samuel Morse invents the telegraph and the UK Wills Act was written
We live in a wonderful age of smartphones, social media, biometrics, geolocation and even “smart clothing”. There is however one industry that seems to have dodged the world of technology – the system of writing a Last Will and Testament hasn’t changed much in centuries. In fact, the law pertaining to Wills in the UK was written in 1837, the year that Samuel Morse invented the telegraph, and aside from a few minor updates, the law has not really changed very much. Today, there are at least three major issues with our system of writing a Will;
1. Most people don’t have one
Everybody should have a Will, but most people don’t have one, and for those that do, most are not kept up-to-date. This is a serious issue as people end up dying intestate and their estate is not distributed according to their wishes, or worse, their wealth goes to the government. There are a number of reasons for this; general procrastination and cost are most frequently cited. In most cases though, it comes down to the misconception that the only people who can write Wills are legal professionals. This is of course not true, anybody can write their own Will, but the legal profession continually scaremongers the general public by making weak analogies (“you wouldn’t perform your own brain surgery, so why would you write your own Will?”) or making it sound more difficult than it actually is “use a lawyer because you have to sign it correctly or it is invalid” (you have to sign the document in the presence of two witnesses….most people can understand this instruction). But the best method for making the process seemingly beyond the understanding of the general public is persisting in using the language of Chaucer and Shakespeare. Wills are still filled with terms like “hereinafter”, “thereof”, “hereunder” and 250 word sentences (I counted an actual sentence in my Will). There is absolutely no justifiable reason for forcing a document written in 2013 to be totally unreadable. There is also no legal requirement to use impenetrable prose to write a Will.
2. Finding the Will
The most frequent call we receive at LegalWills is from a loved one who thinks their family member had a Will, but they can’t find it. There is no registry of Wills, and if there were, most people wouldn’t use them. There is also no way of knowing whether a Will that has been found is the latest version. It is a system that should not exist in the advanced technology age that we are living. The only legal Will is a printed piece of paper with a scrawled signature. Electronic Wills are not legal, nor video Wills, nor digital signatures on Wills. If a person dies in a house fire, chances are their Will went with them. Everybody who dies from a natural disaster will probably be deemed to have died intestate as their Will went with the tornado…flood…tsunami. And don’t assume that writing a Will with a lawyer is any help, we often hear “my father died in Vancouver, he wrote a Will with a lawyer, but we don’t know which one, but I think he wrote it about 25 years ago”. It is a hopeless situation.
3. Collecting the Assets
Assuming that a Will has been written (point 1) and the Will has been found (point 2), the Will probably says something like “I leave my entire estate to …” . The Executor then has to start gathering up these assets; the life insurance policies, bank accounts, government bonds, share certificates, cash, online accounts. The problem is, the Executor has absolutely no way of knowing when they are done. We wrote about this in a previous article when Citibank put out a 16 page supplement to the New York Times with a list of thousands of old accounts asking for people to claim them. There are some tools available to help, like www.mylifelocker.com. But again, it’s a problem that shouldn’t exist in 2013.
At LegalWills.ca, LegalWills.co.uk and USLegalWills.com we are trying to help with each of these issues, and I will describe in more detail in future blog posts. But it is infuriating at a time when I can buy a pair of socks with smart sensors and an accompanying iPhone app that the Wills business seems to have been frozen for 200 years.
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