Denise, a Jacksonville freelance photographer, had a will from a decade ago and assumed it covered everything. It did not touch her digital life: fifteen years of client galleries in cloud storage, two income-generating stock-photo accounts, a business payment account, and a small cryptocurrency position she had bought on a whim. When her brother died the year before, she watched his family spend months locked out of his email and photos because no one had the legal authority to ask for them. She came in thinking she needed a whole new will. She did not — she needed the right five documents, aligned and current.
Digital assets are the part of a modern estate that a traditional will handles worst. The reason is not sloppy drafting. It is that access to online accounts is governed by a specific Florida statute — Chapter 740, Florida's Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act — and by the terms of service you clicked "agree" on years ago. After 30 years of practice, here are the five documents that actually decide who controls your digital estate, and the order Florida reads them in.
The priority order that surprises people
Chapter 740 reads three sources in a fixed order: (1) a provider's online tool — the legacy-contact or inactive-account setting — comes first; (2) your estate documents come next; (3) the provider's terms of service apply only if the first two are silent. A setting you clicked inside an app can override your will. That is why all five documents below have to point the same direction.
1. A Will With Express Digital-Asset Authority
Your will names your personal representative and disposes of your property — but under Chapter 740, that appointment does not automatically carry the power to access digital assets. The statute requires the authority to be granted expressly. A will drafted before 2016, or one that simply says "all my property," usually does not contain the specific consent language providers and courts look for.
The fix is language that explicitly authorizes your personal representative to access, manage, distribute, copy, and delete your electronic communications and digital assets, and that consents to disclosure of content under the statute. That single addition is often the difference between a representative who can act and one who spends four months exchanging letters with a provider's legal department.
2. A Funded Revocable Trust That Empowers the Trustee
If you use a revocable living trust to avoid probate, the trust — not the will — controls the assets titled in it. That means the trustee needs the same express digital-asset authority the personal representative does, written into the trust document. A trust that is silent on digital assets creates the same access gap as a silent will, just one document over.
Two practical points matter here. First, the trust only controls what is actually funded into it, so the trustee's digital authority should be paired with a plan for accounts that stay in your individual name. Second, the trustee provisions should track the will's language so a successor fiduciary is not left guessing which document governs. For the interaction between the two, see the companion article on why a modern estate plan has to cover both physical and digital assets.
3. A Durable Power of Attorney With Digital Powers
Death is not the only event that locks people out. Incapacity does it too, and while you are alive your will and trust-at-death provisions do nothing. A durable power of attorney is the document that lets an agent act during your lifetime — but in Florida, a power of attorney only grants what it specifically enumerates. General "handle my affairs" language does not reach digital assets.
A properly drafted durable power of attorney should specifically authorize your agent to access and manage your digital assets and electronic communications under Chapter 740. Without it, a stroke or a long hospitalization can leave your business email, payment accounts, and cloud storage frozen at exactly the moment someone needs to keep the lights on.
4. A Digital Asset Inventory — The Practical Key
The first three documents grant legal authority. This one supplies the practical access, and it is the one almost everyone skips. A digital asset inventory lists what you actually have: email and communication accounts, cloud storage and photos, financial and payment accounts, cryptocurrency wallets and exchanges, revenue-generating accounts, and the devices that unlock the rest. Authority without an inventory is a key to a door your fiduciary cannot find.
Cryptocurrency is where this bites hardest. For coins held in a self-custody wallet, no statute and no judge can reconstruct a lost private key or recovery phrase — the authority in your will is worthless if the seed phrase died with you. The inventory records what exists and where the keys live; it should never contain the passwords or seed phrases themselves in the same place. For a blank worksheet to start with, the firm publishes a free Digital Asset Inventory. Cryptocurrency-heavy estates often warrant the dedicated Crypto Estate Planning service ($799).
5. Provider Online-Tool Designations
This is the document you do not draft — you set it inside the platform. Many major providers offer an "online tool": a legacy contact, an inactive-account manager, or a beneficiary setting for the account itself. Under Chapter 740's priority order, that setting controls first, ahead of your will and trust. A legacy contact you named years ago can quietly override the estate plan you paid a lawyer to draft.
The lesson is not to avoid these tools — they are useful and fast — but to make sure they agree with your documents. If your will leaves your accounts to your spouse but an old online-tool setting names an ex, the setting wins. Review every provider's designation and align it with the plan, then revisit it whenever the plan changes.
When These Five Documents Fall Out of Sync
Every access nightmare I have seen comes from these five pointing in different directions: a will that grants authority but no inventory to use it, an inventory with no legal authority behind it, or an online-tool setting that silently overrides both. The goal is alignment. Get the authority into the will, the trust, and the power of attorney; build and maintain the inventory; and confirm the provider settings match.
For most people this does not mean starting over. If you already have a will and trust, adding express digital-asset authority, building the inventory, and squaring the online-tool settings is a discrete, flat-fee project — not a full redraft. What matters is that it gets done before the moment it is needed, because that moment never comes with a warning.