Creating a Digital Estate Plan in Louisiana

Taking Stock of Your Digital Estate

You do not need to be a cryptocurrency investor to have a digital estate. If you use social media—whether it is Instagram, Facebook, or Snapchat—you already have virtual assets.

In fact, any content that is stored in your phone, on your laptop, or in a cloud server could be considered a digital asset.

Your digital estate could include:

• Online bank accounts
• Social media accounts
• Personal blog or digital journal
• Email account
• Photographs and video stored in a cloud server or digital drive
• YouTube channel
• E-commerce profile
• Cryptocurrency wallet

Even if your digital estate does not have a monetary value, you might still want your family members to take control of your virtual assets once you pass away. By assuming control of your accounts, they could moderate automated content, create a memorial post, or inherit your investments.

Digital Estate Planning Demands Modern Solutions

Louisiana law is always changing. However, legislators and policymakers are still trying to understand how digital assets can fit into traditional estate plans. This disconnect—between decades-old guidance and the realities of the present day—can present unexpected challenges for anyone trying to secure their estate.

Many social media platforms, for instance, have terms and conditions that prohibit them from handing over a user’s account details—even if the user has passed away, and their relative is trying to access an asset they are supposed to inherit. In this way, modern estate plans need to account for modern challenges.

The Different Approaches to Digital Estate Planning

Some states, like California, have already introduced and enacted digital estate laws.

While Louisiana is still developing more legislation, residents of the Bayou State still have options. The two most fundamental approaches to digital estate planning are:

• The Inventory Model. Someone who holds limited digital assets—such as a handful of social media accounts or a single, low-value cryptocurrency wallet—could simply “inventory” their estate by listing their assets such as account usernames, passwords, and document instructions. This inventory could be included as an addendum to a will and be entrusted to a special digital estate executor. However, digital inventories are not ideal for everyone, especially people who spend a lot of time with technology and may not have the time, resources, or energy to document all of their holdings.
• The Trust Model. Some digital assets such as cryptocurrency can be transferred into the control of a trust. A revocable living trust, for instance, allows an individual founder—or trustor—to transfer digital, physical, and financial assets into the trust. While the trustor is still alive, they can exercise limited control over their assets and set conditions for how these assets should be distributed when the trustor dies. A trust model for digital estates should be considered by anyone who values their online profile, owns significant assets, or is a beneficiary to revenue-generating content.

Both the Inventory Model and Trust Model have distinct advantages and disadvantages. Many Louisianans with complex digital estates may need professional assistance in creating a succession plan that accounts for the intricacies of virtual property—from protecting the keys to a cryptocurrency wallet to understanding how platform terms of service could affect transfers of ownership.

Contact Us Today

Estate plans are supposed to be comprehensive. If you are trying to create an estate plan from scratch or have not yet accounted for digital assets in your existing will or trust, you—and your loved ones—could reap significant financial rewards by taking your first steps to protect your digital estate.

However, the complexity of Louisiana’s existing laws can make digital estate planning difficult. To ensure your legacy remains safe, consult an attorney who has the experience you need to keep both your physical and digital assets safe. Send us a message online to schedule your consultation today.

What Digital Assets Belong in a Louisiana Estate Plan

A digital estate plan must begin with a complete inventory of the digital assets a person owns or controls. The categories are broader than most people initially realize. Financial accounts with online access — bank accounts, investment accounts, cryptocurrency holdings — are the highest-stakes digital assets because they have direct monetary value and because access after death depends entirely on the survivor’s ability to present the correct credentials or legal authority to the financial institution. Cryptocurrency presents particular challenges: unlike bank accounts, cryptocurrency holdings stored in a private wallet have no institutional custodian who can be contacted to transfer the assets. If the private keys are lost, the cryptocurrency is simply gone — no court order can recover it.

Email accounts, social media profiles, and cloud storage services contain personal content — photographs, correspondence, creative work, business records — that may have sentimental, commercial, or evidentiary value. Each platform has its own policy for handling accounts after the user’s death: some allow a designated person to access or memorialize the account, others delete all content automatically after a period of inactivity, and others have no formal process at all. Without advance planning, the family may find that irreplaceable content is inaccessible or permanently deleted. Domain names and websites owned by the decedent are also assets that may have commercial value — a business website, a monetized blog, or a domain name that could be sold — and that require active management to preserve their value during the succession.

Subscription services and auto-renewing accounts deserve attention in a digital estate plan as well. A person who dies while subscribed to dozens of streaming services, software licenses, and recurring payments will have those charges continuing to hit their accounts until someone identifies and cancels each one. An organized digital estate plan that lists all active subscriptions — with the account credentials or the platform and the associated email address — allows the successor to quickly identify and cancel ongoing charges rather than discovering them one at a time on bank statements over the course of months. The aggregate value of recurring charges that continue unnecessarily after death is often surprising.

How Digital Assets Pass After Death Under Louisiana Law

Louisiana’s Revised Statutes, through the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (RUFADAA), govern how personal representatives and other fiduciaries access a deceased person’s digital assets. Under this framework, the platform’s own terms of service control the baseline — if a platform allows users to designate an account successor (as Facebook’s Legacy Contact and Google’s Inactive Account Manager do), that designation takes precedence over the will or other legal documents. An estate planning attorney who does not address these online tool designations as part of the plan may inadvertently allow the platform’s terms of service to override the client’s testamentary intentions — sending digital assets to whoever was last named in the platform’s tool rather than the person designated in the will.

When no online tool designation exists, a valid will or trust that explicitly grants the successor trustee or executor authority to access digital assets provides the next layer of authorization under Louisiana’s version of RUFADAA. A generic will that does not specifically address digital assets may not provide the authority the executor needs to access specific platforms — technology companies’ legal teams are often conservative about releasing access without explicit authorization. The succession attorney drafts the will’s digital asset provisions to give the executor the broadest possible authorization that Louisiana law supports, reducing the likelihood that an executor will be turned away by a platform’s compliance department when trying to access important accounts.

For cryptocurrency specifically, the planning challenge is technical rather than legal. No court order, no will provision, and no platform policy can recover cryptocurrency if the private keys are lost. The estate plan must ensure that the private keys — or the recovery seed phrase — are preserved and accessible to the successor while also protected from theft or unauthorized access during the testator’s lifetime. Hardware wallets, encrypted storage, sealed envelopes held by an attorney, and multi-signature arrangements all provide different levels of security and accessibility. The right approach depends on the amount of cryptocurrency involved, the testator’s technical sophistication, and the reliability of the people who will need to access the assets after death. A succession attorney can advise on the general framework, but the implementation of cryptocurrency preservation requires close attention to the technical specifics of each holding.

Practical Steps for Building a Louisiana Digital Estate Plan

The first practical step in creating a digital estate plan is creating and maintaining a comprehensive digital asset inventory — a document or secure digital file that lists every significant account the testator holds, the platform, the associated email address, the username, the password or a reference to where the password is stored, and any account-specific successor designations. This inventory should be stored securely — not in an unsecured document on a laptop that anyone might access, but in a password manager whose master password is known to a trusted person, or in a sealed envelope held by the estate planning attorney, or in some other system that is both secure during the testator’s lifetime and accessible to the executor after death. The inventory should be reviewed and updated at least annually, because digital accounts change frequently.

The will or trust document should include an explicit grant of authority for the executor or trustee to access, manage, and distribute digital assets. This provision should be drafted broadly enough to cover asset types that do not yet exist — the digital landscape changes faster than estate planning documents are typically updated. The will should also provide guidance on the testator’s wishes regarding specific digital assets: social media accounts that should be memorialized or deleted, personal correspondence that should be preserved or destroyed, a blog or website that should be transferred to a specific person or sold, and any cryptocurrency holdings with instructions for how the private keys can be accessed. These specific instructions prevent the executor from having to make difficult judgment calls under time pressure in unfamiliar technical territory.

Finally, the digital estate plan should be communicated to the executor and relevant trusted persons during the testator’s lifetime — not kept entirely secret until death. An executor who has never heard of a password manager and has no idea where to begin accessing digital accounts is poorly positioned to fulfill their responsibilities efficiently. A brief conversation with the executor about the general outline of the digital asset inventory, the location of the relevant documents, and the existence of any significant cryptocurrency or other high-value digital assets can prevent confusion and delay at an already difficult time. Digital estate planning is not completed when the documents are signed; it is completed when the people who will need to act on those documents are prepared to do so.