SJD / Dr. iuris Antonio Tejeda Encinas President Comité Euro Americano de Derecho Digital — CEA Digital Law | CEO META Channel Corporation
In recent years it has become fashionable to talk about digital wills as if we were facing a new legal category in gestation, pending only that positive law finishes “adapting” to technology. Blockchain, immutability, evidentiary hashes, smart contracts that would automatically execute the last will of the deceased are mentioned. The underlying diagnosis is always the same: inheritance law lags behind technological reality. That diagnosis is wrong.
Inheritance law is not delayed. He’s doing just what he has to do. The problem is not that the technology has not been integrated yet, but that it is trying to integrate in the wrong place. When regulations require solemn forms, control of capacity or respect for legitimate rights, they do so not out of legal tradition, but in response to very specific conflicts: family pressures, vulnerability of the deceased, the need for asset predictability and to reduce ex post litigation.
The core of inheritance law, unavailable character in certain extremes, solemn forms, limits to the autonomy of the will, does not reveal an inability to absorb innovation, but rather a decision of legal policy. The testamentary form does not fulfill a merely evidentiary function, but rather a constitutive one: it is not limited to proving the will, it constructs it legally under guarantees. That is why inheritance law does not pursue efficiency or automation; pursues asset stability, prevention of abuse, capacity control and intergenerational security. That is why it requires qualified intermediation. That is why he distrusts immediacy. That’s why it introduces friction.
Technology, by definition, pushes in the opposite direction.
Here appears the conceptual error that hinders a good part of LegalTech projects in successions: confusing technical immutability with legal validity. The fact that an act is recorded unalterably does not make it valid. A hash does not cure a lack of capacity. A smart contract does not replace legal judgment on discernment or the analysis of whether the will was free or induced. Traceability does not eliminate the need for form when form operates as a structural guarantee, not as a simple ritual.
From this confusion arises the pretension, attractive in presentation, but legally unviable, of an “on-chain” will that would produce succession effects simply by existing technologically. This model is not disruptive: it is incompatible with the logic of civil tradition inheritance law. Not because the law is conservative, but because this approach ignores its essential function: order transmission mortis causa under conditions of external control, verifiability and general opposability.
Meanwhile, the real problems lie elsewhere. Inheritances with crypto assets inaccessible to heirs. Accounts on digital platforms whose control is lost when the owner dies. Fragmented regulatory responses for digital assets that mix regulatory gaps with partial and even contradictory solutions. None of this is resolved by “uploading the will to a blockchain.”
Where technology does have a place, and where it is useful, is not in the creation of the succession title, but in its infrastructure: reinforced proof of integrity and chronology, auditable custody of versions of the will, secure management of digital assets and credentials, post-mortem access protocols under the control of qualified third parties, conditional and reversible execution of certain instructions, always subordinated to a valid succession title. All this strengthens the system without denaturing it.
The future is not the digital will understood as a substitute for the legal will. The future is the legally valid will assisted by technology. The difference is not one of etiquette; It is structural. It requires distinguishing which elements of the system are available and which fulfill an unavailable guarantee function.
That is why it is striking that the public debate continues to revolve around whether the law should “give in” to technology. The relevant question is another: if we are designing technology that understands the internal logic of inheritance law or if we continue to project onto it a simple idea of efficiency that works well in a white paper, but falls apart when it enters a courtroom.
Inheritance law does not need to be disintermediated. It needs better legal and technological intermediation.
As long as this is not assumed, technically impeccable and legally inoperative solutions will continue to appear. And what is actually the deliberate defense of functions that no technology, no matter how sophisticated it may be, can or should replace, will continue to be called “resistance of law.”
