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www.canadianlawyermag.com 37 "Technology is the new player at the estate-planning table." Sharon Hartung, author of Your Digital Undertaker service to avoid coming to you?'" she says. However, Bury found there "isn't a tonne of crossover" between Willful's customer base and clients designing $2,000 wills in their lawyer's office. The hardest part, she says, is getting people to think about estate planning to realize they need to get it done. To help nudge people toward addressing that unpleasant topic, Sharon Hartung, a retired aerospace engineer for the Royal Canadian Air Force and an IBM executive, wrote Your Digital Undertaker. Through her exploration of estates law and background in tech, Hartung identified an incoming shift in life's leftovers. "I really began to realize that, in the digital age, it's going to get really interesting for us in terms of how the estate industry is going to deal with our digital footprint, notwith- standing the transformation that's about to happen with the largest wealth transfer and the impact of technology," she says. The internet will affect estates lawyers in three ways, she says. First, clients will now have digital assets: email, social media history, gaming tokens, cloud repositories and crypto-currency. A spokesperson from Deloitte Canada told The Globe and Mail that, by 2020, the average Canadian will have digital assets worth at least $10,000. Second, there is new law emerging to change the role of an executor to fit a digital life. The Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act gives executors a legal method of managing digital assets in the U.S., and similar laws appear to be on the way in Canada, she says. Third, "technology is the new player at the estate planning table," as tech entrepreneurs unleash new products like Willful and Hull e-State Planner. NoticeConnect is also such a product. Founder Patrick Hartford was studying for the estates section for the bar exam and came across the practice of publishing notices to creditors. The expensive and mostly fruit- less ordeal struck him as an obvious gap that could be filled with an online service. "Though it was really, I think, a way to avoid studying for the bar, I thought maybe this could be done online. And it turned out there was no reason that couldn't be," he says. Hartford's company created a website for publishing, accessing and managing legal notices and connecting them with their intended audience. In 2017, the company brought a test case to the Ontario Superior Court and the ruling confirmed that Notice- Connect satisfied the requirements of the Trustee Act. In the process, Hartford also found there was a need for a centralized will registry and so his company recently launched Canada Will Registry. At the time of writing, they have 84,000 registered wills, 730 law firms using the product and, once they reach 100,000 registered wills, they'll implement a search function, Hartford says. "We want it to be the estate equivalent of a title search in the real estate context," he says. TOP BOUTIQUES 2020 Vote for the best intellectual property and labour and employment boutique firms. Results will be published in the February issue of Canadian Lawyer https://www.canadianlawyermag.com/surveys-reports CL-TopBoutiques-2019-7.3x2.4in-v2.indd 1 20/09/2019 6:44:54 AM