Is there a need for writing wills on the high street?

Everyone needs a will. Without one, all of your belongings end up with the State, who will sell them at auction and pocket the proceeds. Having worked your whole life and paid an unconscionable amount of cash to the State in taxes already, one assumes that the last thing you wish to do is pay it more on the event of your death. Wills, then, are paramount – it’s not whether one should write a will, but where, that is the question now. Is there a need for writing wills on the high street, for example? Going into an actual solicitor’s office and paying large sums of money to have everything done and notarised in the ponderous, green leather wrapped surroundings of a traditional will writer?
The short answer: no. A person is now able to get a completely legal, intelligible and official will drawn up for them online. As with everything else in this digital age, the act of one’s last will and testament has been made easier as a stream of bits and bytes – it’s quicker, it costs way less money and it can be done from the comfort of one’s own home. A great boon to those who may be too ill, infirm or just too busy to travel to an office for the same purpose.
The need for writing wills obviously isn’t a new one – and neither is the ability to write one’s wills in the safety of one’s own home. The difference here is that having a solicitor visit one at home costs a lot of money, particularly when that solicitor is making out of office hours calls on his or her way home. One ends up paying legal fees plus travel expenses for a job that can now be done by an exchange of email and nothing more. So the need for doing that job is offset by the ease with which it can be done. The new will writing is completed by a fully qualified will drafter in perfect legalese, as the result of specific instructions given by the client to his or her online brief. That document is signed off and notarised, at which point it becomes a legally binding last will and testament: a perfectly satisfactory answer to the need for writing wills that doesn’t involve prohibitive costs or any inconvenience.
There is never going to be a really easy way to write a will, for the simple reason that thinking about one’s own demise is never very pleasant. That said, writing a will by using an online will drafting agency is a much easier and nicer way of going about things than entering into the always somewhat foreboding relationship one has with one’s lawyer at the time that a will drafting needs to take place.
The Internet, home of making things easy, makes the need for writing wills at least a thing of convenience rather than terror. By doing this vital job through a professional and friendly online company, one feels rather as though one has just completed a boring but ultimately necessary task – rather than having to confront one’s own mortality with too much of a thump.