When you die, are your digital assets accessible? RPPTL drafts legislation to address the 'chaos'.

Once upon a time, we walked into banks to cash our paychecks. We glued precious photos in albums for safekeeping. We kept important papers in file cabinets.

But in today's paperless, high-tech world, paychecks are deposited electronically and bank statements arrive online. Photos pile up in the invisible cloud. And many documents are stored as data on a computer server and accessed via the Internet.

What happens when someone dies, and the executor of the will needs access to online accounts, but doesn't have the passwords? What happens if someone becomes incapacitated and can no longer log on to computers, and a guardian needs access to accounts?

"Just about everybody in Florida is using the Internet, whether you are young, old, or in between. People have eBay accounts, Amazon accounts, photo sites, Google Plus, Dropbox, online banking, you name it. Well, our current law doesn't tell our fiduciaries how to access or control those assets. It's unclear. For every account, the fiduciary doesn't know whether they have the ability to access or control that account or not. There is chaos, basically," said J. Eric Virgil, a Coral Gables attorney who chairs the Digital Assets Committee of The Florida Bar's Real Property, Probate and Trust Law Section.

The RPPTL Section wants to remove that uncertainty, and is ready to make Florida the first state in the country to adopt the latest version of the national Uniform Law Commmission's Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act. (Delaware was the first state to pass a law this summer, under an earlier version of the model law, Virgil said.)

RPPTL Chair Michael Dribin, of Miami, said the Executive Committee approved the proposed legislation, "and it is likely it will go before the Florida Legislature in 2015."

"I do estate planning, and I feel fortunate if someone died and left a list of passwords in some secure place," Dribin said. "The issue is, even if someone left passwords, technically, right now, a personal representative can use the passwords, but there really is no statutory authority for a fiduciary to do that. It is necessary to fill that need and address what is an increasing issue as we go paperless in the world."

Virgil--who drafted Florida's proposed legislation and shared a white paper written by Vice Chair S. Dresden Brunner called "Proposed Enactment of Chapter 740, Florida Statutes"--said: "The nice thing about this legislation is that it was created as a joint project between...