Wilmington attorney Shane T. Johnson on North Carolina’s new electronic storage rule for wills, and the trade-off it creates.
Wilmington, NC (PRUnderground) November 3rd, 2026
A North Carolina law that took effect on January 1 has drawn very little attention outside of law offices, and much of the coverage it did get described it inaccurately. Several summaries announced that the state had legalized electronic wills. It did not.
What Session Law 2025-33 actually did was narrower, and for a lot of families along the Cape Fear it is more useful. It created a process for a North Carolina attorney to store a client’s signed paper will as an electronic record, so that if the original paper ever goes missing, the family is not left trying to prove what it said.
For a coastal county, the timing is hard to ignore. Original wills are kept in desk drawers, closet safes, and bank boxes, and New Hanover County has spent the better part of a decade dealing with storms, flooding, roof damage, and the moves and downsizing that follow.
“People assume the risk is that someone contests the will,” said Shane T. Johnson, a Wilmington estate planning attorney and the founder of Johnson Legal, PLLC. “The more common problem is much duller than that. Nobody can find the original, and now the family has a court fight over a document everybody already agreed with.”
Under North Carolina law before this year, a signed and witnessed will was straightforward to probate as long as the original could be produced after death. If only a photocopy turned up, the will became a lost will, which is harder and costlier to put through probate. Worse, if the will was last known to be in the testator’s possession, North Carolina courts presumed the testator destroyed it on purpose. That presumption can be rebutted, but it has to be rebutted with evidence, in front of the clerk, by the people who are already grieving.
The worst case is not theoretical. A will gets signed, the original is lost for an ordinary reason, the presumption cannot be overcome, and the estate is administered as though the person never made a will at all.
The new Article 11 of Chapter 31 allows an attested written will, meaning a will signed by the testator and at least two witnesses, to be stored as an electronic record. The record has to be created during the testator’s lifetime, at the testator’s direction, by an attorney licensed in North Carolina. The attorney attaches a sworn affidavit stating three things: that the electronic record is a complete and accurate copy of the signed will, that the client authorized it, and that the client was advised of what storing it costs them.
That last point is the part worth slowing down on, because the statute treats it as a genuine trade. Once a will is stored as an electronic record, the presumption of revocation no longer applies to it, and a lost original stops being a crisis. In exchange, the client gives up the ability to revoke that will by physically destroying it. Tearing it up, burning it, or shredding it no longer has any legal effect.
“That one surprises people, and it should be explained before anyone signs anything,” Johnson said. “You can still revoke the will. You just have to do it in writing, the way the statute requires, instead of taking it out to the burn barrel. Honestly, that is the better habit anyway.”
None of this makes North Carolina an electronic will state. There is still no statute allowing a will to be signed, witnessed, and notarized on a screen. A paper will signed in ink has to exist first, and only then can it be stored electronically. Handwritten holographic wills are not eligible at all.
The law does reach backward. A will signed in 2009 or 2018 can be stored as an electronic record today, with no time limit, as long as it is done while the testator is living.
When the time comes, an attorney licensed in the state prints the stored record, attaches a second certifying affidavit, and files that certified paper copy with the Clerk of Superior Court the same way an original would be filed. Only the final affidavit carries an original ink signature. From there, estate administration proceeds as it normally would.
Johnson said the law is less of a reason to rush out and do something new than a reason to check on what is already sitting in a drawer. Find out whether anyone besides you knows where the original signed will is kept, and tell the person named as executor, in plain terms, where to look. Pull the document out and read the date on it, because marriages, deaths, moves across state lines, property sales, and new grandchildren all outrun a plan written for a different decade. Check the rest of the file at the same time, including financial and health care powers of attorney, advance care planning documents, and any trust that was set up years ago and never funded. Confirm that beneficiary designations on retirement accounts and life insurance still name the people you would name today, since those pass outside the will entirely.
“The point of all of this is a soft landing for the people left behind,” Johnson said. “Every one of these steps takes an afternoon. Cleaning up after a missing original takes months.”
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