SJD / Dr. iuris Antonio Tejeda Encinas President Euro-American Committee on Digital Law -CEA Digital Law | CEO Meta Channel Corporation
In recent years, it has become fashionable to speak of 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.
The law of succession is not delayed. He’s doing just what he’s supposed to do. The problem is not that the technology has not yet been integrated, but that it is being tried to be integrated in the wrong place. When legal systems require solemn forms, control of capacity or respect for the reserved share, they do not do so by legal tradition, but in response to very specific conflicts: family pressures, vulnerability of the deceased, need for patrimonial predictability and to reduce ex post litigation.
The core of inheritance law, unavailability in certain extremes, solemn forms, limits to the autonomy of the will, does not reveal an inability to absorb innovation, but a decision of legal policy. The testamentary form does not fulfill a merely evidentiary function, but constitutive: it is not limited to accrediting the will, it constructs it juridically under guarantees. That is why inheritance law does not pursue efficiency or automation; it pursues patrimonial stability, prevention of abuse, capacity control and intergenerational security. That is why it requires qualified intermediation. That is why he is wary of 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 registered in an unalterable way does not make it valid. A hash does not cure a lack of ability. A smart contract does not replace the 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 claim, attractive in presentation, but legally unfeasible, of an “on-chain” will that would produce succession effects by the mere fact of existing technologically. This model is not disruptive: it is incompatible with the logic of inheritance law in civil tradition. Not because the law is conservative, but because this approach ignores its essential function: order the transfer mortis causa under conditions of external control, verifiability and general opposability.
Meanwhile, the real problems lie elsewhere. Inheritances with cryptoassets inaccessible to the 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 solved by “uploading the will to a blockchain”.
Where technology does have a future, and here 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 subordinate to a valid succession title. All this strengthens the system without distorting 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 makes it necessary to distinguish which elements of the system are available and which fulfill an unavailable function of guarantee.
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: whether we are designing technology that understands the internal logic of inheritance law or whether we continue to project on 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 in reality the deliberate defense of functions that no technology, no matter how sophisticated, can or should replace, will continue to be called “resistance of law.”
