Ashwani Prabhakar | Source | Trusts & Estates Attorney at Davidoff Hutcher & Citron
Ashwani Prabhakar
Ashwani Prabhakar is an attorney for Davidoff Hutcher & Citron’s Trusts and Estates, planning and litigation group in our New York City office. For five years, he served as the Principal Law Clerk for New York Surrogate Court Judge Margarita Lopez Torres, where he learned Trust and Estate litigation. He later became an Associate attorney in two regional law firms, focusing on Surrogate Court litigation. He is well-versed in trusts and estates litigation, and helps trusts and estates clients identify and recognize potential litigation disputes that can arise from a will and wealth preservation plans at probate.
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Davidoff Hutcher & Citron (https://www.dhclegal.com)
Trusts & Estates Attorney
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Because the instructions aren’t in Anne Heche’s own handwriting, the statute (California Probate Code Section 6111) permitting holographic wills’ primary purpose of preventing fraud is defeated if the email is admitted as a will using the holographic statute. The absence of a handwriting by Heche makes the holographic statute inapplicable to this case. In fact, the holographic wills statute does not even provide for material provisions to be typed and then signed by hand. To prevent fraud, it requires almost the entire document to be handwritten by the testator. For these reasons, I do not think a California Court will admit the email as a holographic will.
It should be noted that a Uniform Electronic Wills Act is being floated in the United States by the Uniform Law Commission as an idea to grant testators more freedom to draft wills without incurring legal fees, but even that new law, if adopted, requires formalities such as an electronic signature and witnesses to prevent fraud. None of these fraud prevention measures are present in the sending of an email.
