A well-drafted will can still lead to a stalled estate. Increasingly the reason is not the paperwork you prepared but the digital life your client never wrote down. Photos, crypto, loyalty points, a business that runs through a personal inbox. The instructions are perfect; the map to the assets is missing.
Where estates stall now
The mechanics of probate have not changed, but the shape of an estate has. A generation ago the executor’s search was physical: statements on the doormat, a deed box, a shoebox of policies. Today a growing share of value and administration lives behind logins that leave no paper trail. Statements are paperless, accounts are app-only and the first sign of an asset is often a renewal email nobody can open. Executors lose weeks reconstructing what a client could have listed in an afternoon.
What counts as a digital asset
It is a broader category than clients assume, and the mix of sentimental and financial is where the difficulty sits. In practice it spans:
- Financial: online banks and app-only accounts, investment and pension platforms, PayPal balances, cryptocurrency and any tokens held in a wallet.
- Income-producing: a sole trader business run through personal email, marketplace shops, a monetised channel or domain names with real value.
- Loyalty and credit: air miles, supermarket points and reward balances, some of which are transferable on death and some of which are not.
- Sentimental: years of photos and video, correspondence and anything held only in cloud storage.
- Liabilities: buy-now-pay-later arrangements and subscriptions that keep drawing on the estate until someone cancels them.
The access problem, not just the ownership problem
Two issues sit beneath most digital difficulties, and they need separating. The first is ownership: some things a client thinks they own are only licensed to them, and the value dies with the account. The second is access. Even genuinely inheritable assets can be stranded if nobody can prove entitlement or locate the login. The Computer Misuse Act means an executor cannot simply help themselves to an account, so lawful access depends on the provider’s own process, a death certificate and the grant of representation. GOV.UK sets out how to apply for probate; what it cannot do is tell an executor the account was ever there. That gap is the client’s to close, in advance.
Building digital into Client Readiness
The fix is a light-touch habit at instruction stage rather than a new service line. When you take will instructions, prompt the client to record their digital life alongside their wishes. A simple standing question, what would your executor struggle to find, surfaces most of it. Encourage a maintained inventory that lists where assets are held and how access is intended to work, kept separate from the will itself so it can be updated without re-execution and never exposes passwords in the will document, which becomes a public record after the grant. Clients who arrive with this in hand make for faster drafting, cleaner administration and far fewer calls to your office two years on. This is what Client Readiness looks like in practice: the will says who gets what, and the record says where to find it.
Why the conversation belongs at will stage
Digital assets are easiest to capture at the exact moment a client is already thinking about what they own and who should have it. Raise it later and it becomes a separate errand that rarely gets done. Woven into the will interview it costs a few extra minutes and no extra appointment. It also positions the firm well: the client leaves feeling their affairs are genuinely in order, not just their will, and that is the impression that generates referrals. For probate teams on the receiving end years later, a client who was prompted to keep an inventory is the difference between a smooth administration and a forensic one.
Where FamilySafe fits
FamilySafe gives your clients a structured place to hold that digital inventory and share it with the executors and family who will need it, kept current between reviews and separate from the will. For firms it turns a vague instruction to get organised into something clients can actually do. The result is estates that move faster and clients who see your advice reaching further than the day they signed.
