Hypothetical scenario: a Jacksonville woman was named personal representative of her father's estate. He had a valid, properly executed Florida will, and she assumed that settled everything. It did not. The will disposed of his house and his bank accounts, but it said nothing about digital assets, and that silence is where the estate stalled.
When she tried to close his email, every password-reset and account-closure path ran back through an inbox she could not enter. His cloud storage held the only copies of decades of family photographs. And an exchange account held a meaningful cryptocurrency balance the family knew existed but could not reach. Each provider gave the same answer: the will named her but gave no consent to disclosure of the content of his electronic communications and no direction about his accounts, so federal privacy law and their terms of service controlled.
How the hypothetical problem was framed
The issue was not the validity of the will. It was the absence of any direction about digital assets. Under Florida's Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, a personal representative can generally request a catalog of the accounts and other digital assets with letters of administration or another court order, but access to the content of email and messages requires the user's consent in an online tool, a will or another document, or a court order. The father had given none. The exchange demanded a court order; the crypto's two-factor code was tied to a phone the carrier had already deactivated; and the self-custodied portion had a seed phrase no one could locate.
How the plan would have been structured
- An inventory across the six categories (email, cloud storage, cryptocurrency, social and content accounts, subscriptions and financial apps, and business logins) built and kept current, separate from the will.
- The online-tool designations set with each major provider: the tier that, under the statute, outranks even the will.
- Digital-asset provisions drafted into the will and trust, including consent to disclosure of the content of electronic communications, in language that tracks Chapter 740.
- The same authority added to a durable power of attorney, so a fiduciary could act during incapacity, not only after death.
- A secure custody plan for the cryptocurrency, so the keys would survive without being exposed while the owner was living.
Why that mattered
In the hypothetical, the daughter eventually recovered the email and the photos through provider legacy processes, but only after months of friction, and the self-custodied crypto was never recovered, because no authority can regenerate a lost private key. The illustrative point is structural: the will had done its job on the physical estate and left the digital estate completely exposed. The cheapest version of this story is the one where the consent language, the online-tool settings, and the secure inventory exist before anyone needs them, not after.