The practice of creating a will to dispose of your assets dates to ancient Greece. The will as most people know it in the United States can trace its form to 17th-century British law.
For centuries, one requirement for a will to be valid, whether it was written by hand, drafted by a lawyer or typed out on a home computer, was that it had be signed with ink in front of witnesses.
There have been a few exceptions — one litigator recalled a farmer who scrawled his wishes on the dusty tractor that had run him over — but the process has otherwise been largely unchanged since it was conceived.
But a movement is growing to legalize e-signatures for wills and trusts, which would allow people to complete the whole process online, without a lawyer or notary present. The driving force behind this change is the Uniform Law Commission, a nonprofit organization that proposes laws for states to adopt. Last month, the commission drafted the Uniform Electronic Wills Act to serve as a model for states.
Online wills are nothing new. Rocket Lawyer and Legal Zoom offer them, along with scores of other legal documents and services. FreeWill, which I wrote about last year, put a charitable spin on will creation, creating a platform to name charities in a will. A company called Tomorrow is trying to make legal documents like wills more engaging by asking people to go through the process with partners or family members.
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