Ride the Lightning

Death and Digital Assets

January 3, 2019

Over the holidays, we lost a dear friend in the legal community and were once again reminded that we need to keep stressing the need for digital asset planning. Our friend knew he had cancer, but he believed he was going to beat the cancer – and he certainly never imagined a precipitous decline leaving his mind foggy and unable to speak or write.

As a result, there is a great deal of financial and other important information residing on his iPad. His grieving wife doesn't know whether he wrote any passwords down (she's looking) and she doesn't know his Apple ID. We hope that, between Virginia's digital asset law and our digital forensics capabilities, we may be able to help her.

But this whole nightmare could have been avoided by consulting with an estate lawyer who understands digital assets. Much of it also could have been avoided if our friend had used a password manager and given her the password to get into it.

The grief of losing a spouse is hard enough – adding all the worries stemming from our use of technology to manage our finances and many other aspects of our lives creates a terrible unintentional burden.

If you have not adequately addressed your digital assets, please make a New Year's resolution to do so – we are seeing way too many grieving clients who, in the midst of their distress, come to us to get information from digital devices that they don't know how to access.

E-mail:    Phone: 703-359-0700
Digital Forensics/Information Security/Information Technology
https://www.senseient.com
https://twitter.com/sharonnelsonesq
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sharondnelson
https://amazon.com/author/sharonnelson