SJD / Dr. iuris Antonio Tejeda Encinas | President, CEA Digital Law (Euro-American Committee of Digital Law) | CEO, META Channel Corporation
In recent years it has become fashionable to talk about digital wills as if we were looking at a new legal category in the making, waiting only for positive law to finish “adapting” to technology. People talk of blockchain, immutability, evidential hashes and smart contracts that would automatically carry out the testator’s last wishes. The underlying diagnosis is always the same: inheritance law lags behind technological reality. That diagnosis is wrong.
Inheritance law is not lagging behind. It is doing exactly what it is supposed to do. The problem is not that technology has not yet been integrated, but that people are trying to integrate it in the wrong place. When legal systems require solemn formalities, capacity checks or respect for forced heirship, they do so not out of legal tradition, but in response to very specific conflicts: family pressure, the vulnerability of the testator, the need for predictability over assets and to reduce ex post litigation.
The core of inheritance law (its mandatory nature on certain points, solemn formalities, limits on testamentary freedom) does not reveal an inability to absorb innovation, but a deliberate choice of legal policy. The testamentary form does not serve a merely evidential function but a constitutive one: it does not merely prove the will; it constructs it in law, with safeguards. That is why inheritance law does not pursue efficiency or automation; it pursues stability of assets, prevention of abuse, control of capacity and intergenerational security. That is why it requires qualified intermediation. That is why it distrusts immediacy. That is why it introduces friction.
Technology, by definition, pushes in the opposite direction.
This is where the conceptual error appears that holds back many LegalTech projects in succession: confusing technical immutability with legal validity. The fact that an act is recorded immutably does not make it valid. A hash does not cure a lack of capacity. A smart contract does not replace legal judgement on the testator’s discernment, or the analysis of whether their intention was freely formed or induced. Traceability does not remove the need for formalities when form operates as a structural safeguard, not as a mere ritual.
From this confusion arises the claim, attractive in a presentation but legally unworkable, that an “on-chain” will could produce effects in succession simply by existing technologically. This model is not disruptive: it is incompatible with the logic of inheritance law in the civil-law tradition. Not because the law is conservative, but because this approach ignores its essential function: to govern transmission mortis causa under conditions of external control, verifiability and enforceability against third parties.
Meanwhile, the real problems lie elsewhere. Estates holding crypto-assets that the heirs cannot access. Accounts on digital platforms over which control is lost when the account holder dies. Fragmented regulatory responses to digital assets that combine regulatory gaps with partial and even contradictory solutions. None of this is solved by “uploading the will to a blockchain”.
Where technology does have a role, and a useful one, is not in creating the instrument of succession but in its infrastructure: stronger proof of integrity and chronology, auditable custody of successive versions of the will, secure management of digital assets and credentials, post-mortem access protocols under the control of qualified third parties, and conditional, reversible execution of certain instructions, always subject to a valid instrument of succession. All of this strengthens the system without distorting its nature.
The future is not the digital will understood as a substitute for the legal will. The future is the legally valid will supported by technology. The difference is not one of labels; it is structural. It requires us to distinguish which elements of the system are open to change and which perform a safeguarding function that cannot be set aside.
That is why it is striking that public debate still revolves around whether the law should “give way” to technology. The real question is a different one: whether we are designing technology that understands the internal logic of inheritance law, or whether we keep projecting onto it a simple notion of efficiency that works well in a white paper but falls apart once it reaches a courtroom.
Inheritance law does not need to be disintermediated. It needs better legal and technological intermediation.
Until this is accepted, technically flawless but legally ineffective solutions will keep appearing. And what is in fact the deliberate defence of functions that no technology, however sophisticated, can or should replace will continue to be called “the law’s resistance”.
