Legacy contact

What it means

Several large providers offer their own tool: a legacy contact, an inactive account manager, a memorialization setting. Naming somebody there is the provider's own instruction, given by the account holder.

The federal-model law most states have adopted puts that online setting first in the order of authority — ahead of a will, a trust, or a power of attorney, and ahead of the provider's general terms.

What the contact can reach varies: sometimes a download of stored content, sometimes only the ability to close or memorialize the account.

Why it matters

It is the one place where five minutes inside an account beats a paragraph in a will, and almost nobody has done it.

Its absence is why families lose photographs and correspondence: providers delete on their own schedules, and a fiduciary without the setting has a slower and sometimes impossible route.

When you are likely to meet it

• When organizing your own accounts.
• When a family cannot reach a parent's photographs or email.
• When a provider refuses to discuss an account.

How this varies by state

Which version of the fiduciary access law a state has adopted, and how far it reaches, are set by state law.

Related terms

• Catalog of electronic communicationsThe list of who was written to and when — as distinct from what the messages said.
• Custodian (of a digital asset)The company holding the account — and, under the digital-assets statutes, the party an executor or agent is actually asking.
• Digital assetAn online account or file that has value or meaning — email, photographs, cloud storage, domains, currency accounts, loyalty balances.
• ExecutorThe person named in a will to carry it out — once a court actually appoints them.
• Fiduciary dutyThe obligation to act for somebody else's benefit rather than your own — and to be able to show you did.
• Letter of instructionAn informal document left alongside a will, saying the practical things a will has no room for.
• Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets ActThe law, adopted in most states, that gives an executor, trustee or agent a route to a person's digital accounts.

Sahvelo guidance that uses this

• Digital legacy