Book review: Digital Executor: Unraveling the New Path for Estate Planning
By Sharon Hartung TEP
Reviewed by Emily Deane TEP
Digital Executor: Unraveling the New Path for Estate Planning by Sharon Hartung TEP is a contemporary and essential read for practitioners involved in estate planning, incapacity planning and estate administration who are seeking a greater understanding of how to incorporate digital asset management into practice. Hartung reinforces that there is no escaping the modern digital landscape now that our everyday lives are constituted of both physical and digital assets that need to be considered and managed sensitively and proactively.
Digital assets are problematic for the practitioner, as they have many complexities that can include multiple privacy, security and/or confidentiality considerations, as well as financial or sentimental value, which may require specialist technical, legal or tax advice when it comes to estate administration. As the author reinforces: ‘There is a shift in thinking required to deal with digital assets: if clients do not plan for their digital assets, likely the assets will be invisible, inaccessible, or non‑transferable upon incapacity and/or death.’
Hartung also notes that current difficulties include varying jurisdictional laws on the issues of fiduciary access, privacy, property rights and tax that make this relatively new area of estate planning unclear for practitioners who are struggling to stray abreast of constantly evolving technology and the development of new types of digital asset classes. Further, many of these digital assets are constrained by the service providers and their lack of legacy tools, and there is currently no consistency among digital custodians as to whether ownership of the digital asset is transferable upon death.
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