ARTIFICIAL MECHANISMS AND UPDATE OF WILLS: DISCARDING THE PHENOMENON OF FAILED LEGACIES AND NONEXISTENT LEGATEES

Legatees and legacies are the objects of testamentary disposition.Legatees are carefully chosen from a larger group of a testator's descendants including his objects of interest.Legacies which are considered by a testator to be well deserving are provided for the chosen legatees based on his understanding of the personalities and needs of his beneficiaries.Thus, testamentary disposition is presumed to be a just distribution based on a number of indices known only to the testator until his death.But, a situation where legacies given to named legatees are not found in the Will of a testator after his death and/ or where legatees named to inherit some legacies are discovered to have predeceased the testator may be termed a misnomer to the essence of the inclusion of update mechanisms in Wills.The above seems to be a major defect in Wills despite the fact that regular update of Wills till the death of the maker is enshrined in the statute on Wills.This paper examines the absence of regular update in Wills and found through doctrinal research method that the traditional means of effecting happenings in testators' lives is the obstacle to that feat.The conclusion of the paper is that the use of artificial mechanisms, electronic communication inclusive; to update Wills, will improve the present situation and reflect the real intentions of a testator conceived before his death.The paper recommends a review on the statute on Wills to accommodate the use of electronic communication for testamentary disposition particularly as it relates to its update.