Managing Digital Assets

Naomi R. Cahn (John Theodore Fey Research Professor of Law, George Washington University Law School) recently published her article entitled Postmortem Life On-Line, Prob. & Prop. 36 (Jul./Aug. 2011). The introduction to the article is below:

What happens to a client’s on-line life when the client can no longer manager it? According to En-trustet, a digital estate planning site, an estimated 408,000 U.S. Facebook users will die in 2011; thousands of other will undoubtedly be disabled. Estate planning attorneys are beginning to request, as part of their estate planning questionnaire, information about a client’s on-line presence. This means asking not just about the types of assets but also how they are protected. This can be an extensive list with numerous different passwords on various sites. This first step, of asking a client simply to inventory the range of assets, can be useful in itself, and it provides for the basis for counseling and planning. As this article discusses, relatively little law specifically addresses the inheritance of digital assets. Although there are strong persuasive arguments that on-line assets should be treated in the same way as brick-and-mortar assets, able to be marshaled by executors and personal representatives, these arguments are just beginning to be developed.