In May 2025 the Law Commission of England and Wales recommended that electronic wills be capable of formal validity on an equal basis with paper wills, and published a draft Bill to do it. The recommendation is routinely reported as 'wills going digital' — which invites a specific misreading: that what is proposed is permission to sign a will on a screen. It is not.
This article summarises a Standard Index Group technical note, 'Electronic Wills after Modernising Wills Law' (SIG-TN-2026-04). The full note — the draft Bill's test limb by limb — is linked at the end.
Every paper formality — plus one
Under the draft Bill, an electronic will must satisfy every formality a paper will must satisfy — writing, signature, intention, two witnesses simultaneously present, attestation — and then one more that paper wills never face.
Requirement F demands a reliable system: one that links each signature to its signer at the moment of signing, that identifies the will so it can be distinguished from any copies, and that protects the will against alteration or destruction by anyone but the testator or a person the testator authorises.
Those three limbs are a custody system, an identity system, and a tamper-control system — all pretending to be one will-making formality.
What the Commission ruled out
The Commission's own analysis excludes most of what consumers currently understand by electronic signing: a typed name, a pasted image of a signature, and — on the Commission's expressed doubts — perhaps even a qualified electronic signature on its ordinary terms.
It also states plainly that storage on a home computer or a personal cloud account should not suffice to prove which file is the will. The distance between that standard and any tool in ordinary household use is the note's whole subject. The gap is not a drafting oversight; it is the design.
The honest summary of the reform: an electronic-wills infrastructure has been specified, and does not yet exist.
None of it is law
As the note records (as at June 2026), there is no full Government response, no Bill before Parliament, and no commencement date to wait for — readers should check the current position, but a recommendation is not a law. Meanwhile the pandemic-era video-witnessing concession expired on 31 January 2024.
A will made today is made under the formalities of 1837 — in the standard ceremony, a paper document, signed and witnessed by two witnesses physically present at the same time.
An electronically signed PDF cannot responsibly be treated as a will — whether electronic signing and witnessing can satisfy the formalities at all is uncertain and untested — and a will recorded on a phone is not a will: a recording is not writing.
What this means in practice
The distinction that matters is between preparing a will online and executing one electronically. The first is ordinary and lawful: a will can be drafted digitally today. The second is what the law does not yet provide for: the finished document must be printed, then signed and witnessed the 1837 way. Valoren's will service is built around exactly that line — the draft is prepared digitally, and the document is executed on paper, under the formalities as they actually stand.
This article summarises SIG-TN-2026-04, 'Electronic Wills after Modernising Wills Law' (Joel Patterson, June 2026), DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21462999 — linked below. Applies to England and Wales. This article is for information only.