Content area
Full Text
The co-hosts of the Digital Planning Podcast (DPP), Justin Brown, Jennifer Zegel, and Ross Bruch, recently sat down with Suzanne Brown Walsh, a partner at Murtha Cullina in Hartford, Connecticut, a fellow in the American College of Trust and Estates Counsel (ACTEC), and the chair of the Committee of the Uniform Law Commission that created the Uniform Electronic Estate Planning Documents Act (UEEPDA), and Professor Gerry W. Beyer, the Governor Preston E. Smith Regents Professor of Law at the Texas Tech School of Law, and an ACTEC fellow whom the Uniform Law Commission appointed as the Reporter for the UEEPDA.
The Q&A below consists of selected parts of the podcast conversation with Suzy and Professor Beyer and has been lightly edited for flow. Readers interested in hearing more of the conversation can find DPP's November 16, 2022, episode with Suzy and Professor Beyer wherever you listen to podcasts.
DPP: Can you tell us a little bit about the basis for creating UEEPDA and why the Uniform Law Commission believed that this project was so important?
SBW: This flows out of the Uniform Electronic Wills Act. While we were framing the Uniform Electronic Wills Act and determining how wide its scope should be, we determined that all of the other documents that our clients sign-trusts, powers of attorney, and the like-the ones covered by UEEPDA-we thought they were all allowed under the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act (UETA). There's some doubt about that. Ultimately, we decided that UETA didn't facilitate the signing of these other nontestamentary estate planning documents. The purpose of this project was to make sure those documents will be validated, just as other documents that are e-signed are validated.
DPP: Although some practitioners believe that the UETA already permits the execution of certain electronic estate planning documents that are not wills, many believe that the comments in the UETA about the unilateral nature of those documents should prohibit the electronic execution of those documents. What do you think?
GWB: When you look at the UETA, it says that it deals with transactions, and transactions require two people to be interfacing, and most estate planning documents are unilateral. I thought, as did many others, that, although it is debatable, there is definite authority, or definite...