The dossier archive
Documented cases of digital estate failure. Structural research on the gap between owning something and being able to hand it on. Reference material for solicitors, IFAs, and anyone asking what really goes wrong when someone can no longer hand over their accounts.
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The headline number fell from 7 million to 4.5 million UK adults in a single year. The average holding rose. The estate-planning problem got more acute, not less. The 2025 picture, properly read.
An executor in England and Wales has a duty to gather digital assets and a separate criminal statute that makes accessing them without prior authorisation an offence. The 2025 Property Act addresses ownership. The access gap remains.
A widow in her seventies could not load a card game on her late husband's iPad. The platform demanded a court order. The case became national news, and changed nothing in the platform's published policy for almost six years.
What happens to a digital estate when the access layer is missing — even when the lawyers are good, the executors competent, and the issuing platform unusually willing to help.
The scale of the digital estate problem worldwide. Adoption rates, ownership statistics, and the proportion of digital assets that are documented anywhere an executor can find them.
Twelve percent of UK adults now own some form of digital asset. The proportion of those holdings documented anywhere an executor can find them is vanishingly small. The shape of the gap, in figures.
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