Advisor's Edge, "B.C. lawyers still wary after a year of electronic wills"
The article looks at the adoption of electronic wills in British Columbia:
Stephen Hsia, an estate planning lawyer with Miller Thomson LLP in Vancouver, always regarded electronic wills as the next step in the evolution of testamentary documents.
“I just did not expect B.C. to evolve so fast,” he said, adding there are still too many unknowns in the process to sway him from more traditional methods.
For example, while the provincial government encourages testators to save their wills as PDF files, the legislation was not prescriptive on format.
In addition, the new law requires testators wishing to revoke an electronic will to make a purposeful decision to delete it or print out a copy and destroy it in front of a witness. Alterations to an existing electronic will can only be made via the creation of a new document after the deletion of the original. If multiple versions exist, this could cause uncertainty over which one is valid, Hsia said.
