The bereavement journey does not end at the funeral. It ends, months later, when the estate is settled.
That second half is where families get stuck. In the same week a family is arranging a service, someone is also asking a question nobody has an answer to: where is the will? Millions of people sign valid, legally binding wills and then store them somewhere only they know about. A safe deposit box. A solicitor’s file room. A drawer in a house that has since been sold. When the testator dies, the executor inherits a legal obligation but not the paperwork. Probate stalls, families guess, and estates sit frozen.
Locate My Will was founded to close that gap, with a deliberately narrow premise: register where a will is kept, not the will itself.
Net Solutions partnered with LMW to architect and ship a cloud based web platform that records the existence and physical storage location of a will without ever ingesting, hosting, or storing the legal document. The build combined automated subscription billing, third party identity verification, time based activation rules, and audited multi channel messaging.
The engineering problem underneath it is the defining problem of this sector. Sensitive information about a person who has died must reach exactly the right living person, at exactly the right moment, and reach nobody else. Getting that wrong is not a customer service failure. It is a legal one. LMW is our answer to that problem, built and running in production.
LMW came to us with a product concept that was legally sound but architecturally demanding. Five constraints shaped everything we built, and every one of them is familiar to anyone operating in bereavement and estate services.
Executors and beneficiaries routinely cannot confirm whether a will exists at all, let alone where it sits. That uncertainty is one of the most common causes of avoidable probate delay, and it lands on families at the worst possible moment.
A centralized repository of signed wills is an obvious target. It concentrates deeply sensitive personal and financial information in one place and pulls the operator into data protection obligations a small business is not equipped to carry.
Traditional disclosure runs on phone calls, emails, and trust. Nothing in that process confirms that the person asking is who they claim to be, or that they have standing to ask. This is the same manual, judgment based verification that governs who may authorize a cremation, release remains, or approve an interment.
Releasing a will’s location while the testator is alive, or to the wrong party, exposes the platform directly. Access had to be gated on both time and identity, independently.
There was no tamper evident record of who requested what, when the criteria were met, or which parties received estate information. Without that trail, no disclosure decision can be defended after the fact.
We separated location discovery from document storage, and made disclosure conditional on two gates that must both open.
The registry accepts descriptive metadata and location instructions from the Will Owner. It does not accept file uploads. That single architectural decision removes the platform from the document custody business entirely, and with it the storage liability, the breach exposure, and most of the compliance surface. The guiding question was not how to secure what the platform holds. It was what the platform could avoid holding in the first place.
On top of that we built a two gate disclosure workflow. A request cannot progress unless the Will Owner’s configured activation rule has been satisfied and the Authorised Searcher has passed real time government ID verification. Neither gate can be bypassed by the other, and neither can be bypassed by an administrator.
To make the registry secure, controlled, and dependable, we built the solution around five interconnected capabilities, from protecting sensitive information to ensuring the right people are notified at the right time.
Will Owners register the physical location of their document, custodian contact references, and any administrative instructions an executor would need. A strict non ingestion policy is enforced at the application layer, so no legal document is ever uploaded, stored, or transmitted through the platform. The registry knows where the will is. It never knows what the will says.
We integrated Veriff to run real time biometric and document based identity verification on every Authorised Searcher before a search query is processed. Alongside this, temporal activation triggers keep each record locked until the owner’s predefined time based or conditional rules are met. Disclosure is restricted to authenticated individuals the Will Owner has designated, and no one else.
Amazon Simple Email Service handles transactional communication: onboarding, password resets, and formal disclosure notices. Infobip handles high priority SMS, dispatching alerts directly to designated Notification Recipients the moment a verified disclosure event fires. In a sector where communication is time sensitive and emotionally charged, messages reach people on the channel they actually check, and every send is recorded.
Stripe manages plans, recurring billing, and payment processing. We configured Stripe webhooks to synchronize account status in real time, so a lapsed subscription automatically restricts access to core registry tools without manual intervention or a support ticket.
Platform managers work through an internal admin portal protected by multi factor and OTP authentication. Automated audit logging captures every system event: logins, identity verification attempts, disclosure approvals and rejections, and account modifications. The result is a compliance ready trail that can substantiate any decision the platform has made.
Locate My Will moved estate location tracking from an unverified, manual exchange into a controlled digital workflow. The outcomes below are structural rather than procedural. They hold because of how the platform is built, not because of how carefully it is operated.
Because no will is ever stored, the security, privacy, and regulatory exposure associated with hosting legal documents does not exist for LMW. This is a structural outcome, not a control that can fail.
Manual verification has been replaced by real time Veriff checks, so access is granted only to individuals who have proven who they are.
Routing through Amazon SES and Infobip gives interested parties timely alerts on valid disclosure events, with a record of every message sent.
Comprehensive event logging provides full operational visibility across authentication, search, and disclosure activity.
LMW operates a production web application actively managing registry workflows for Will Owners, Authorised Searchers, and Administrators.
Locate My Will is a consumer facing registry. The engineering patterns proven in this build are not specific to wills, and several of them address problems that funeral homes, cemetery groups, cremation providers, and estate administrators solve manually today. The mappings below describe how the same architecture transfers, not work delivered for LMW.
Determining who may legally authorize a cremation, release remains, or approve an interment is a next of kin hierarchy problem currently resolved with paperwork and phone calls. It is structurally the same problem as verifying an Authorised Searcher: confirm identity, confirm standing, log the decision. The two gate model applies directly.
A pre need contract sits dormant for years and then must activate on a triggering event, releasing information and obligations to specific parties. That is the temporal activation trigger pattern, unchanged.
Families request records that must be disclosed to some relatives and withheld from others. Role based permissions plus identity verification replace the manual judgment call.
Price disclosure obligations, state board inspections, and pre need trust and escrow reporting all demand defensible records of what happened and when. The event logging architecture built for LMW is designed for exactly this kind of scrutiny.
Installment plans that lapse, reinstate, and change entitlement status in real time follow the same webhook driven account synchronization pattern implemented with Stripe.
Multiple relatives, an executor, a funeral director, and an attorney all need different views of the same case. LMW’s multi role permission model is the foundation for that.
We build systems that handle sensitive personal workflows without creating data liabilities.
In bereavement and estate services, that matters more than in most sectors. The information is intimate, the recipients are grieving, the legal exposure is immediate, and there is no tolerance for a system that discloses to the wrong person or discloses too soon. Building for this space means asking what a platform can avoid holding before asking how to secure what it holds, and translating legal constraints into enforceable business rules rather than policy documents.
On Locate My Will, that thinking turned a high risk, manual disclosure process into an automated and defensible one. If you are digitising any part of the bereavement or estate journey, from at need arrangements through to estate settlement, we should talk.
Locate My Will is a secure digital registry that records where a physical will is stored, not the will itself. Will Owners register the document’s location, and that information is released only to identity verified Authorised Searchers after the owner’s activation conditions are met.
The administrative burden after a death is largely a problem of finding and verifying information under time pressure. Platforms like Locate My Will remove the guesswork by registering where key documents are held in advance, then releasing that information automatically to verified executors once the conditions for disclosure are satisfied.
No. The platform operates on a strict metadata only model. It records location details, custodian contacts, and administrative instructions, and never ingests, hosts, or stores the legal document. This removes document storage liability from the platform entirely.
Every Authorised Searcher completes real time identity verification through Veriff, which performs biometric and government document checks before any search query is processed. Unverified requests do not reach the registry.
Disclosure requires two independent conditions to be satisfied. The Will Owner’s configured activation rule, which is time based or conditional, must be met, and the searcher must pass identity verification. If either gate fails, the record stays locked, and an administrator cannot override it.
Yes. Verifying who is legally permitted to authorize a cremation, release remains, or approve an interment follows the same logic Net Solutions implemented for Locate My Will: confirm identity in real time, confirm the person’s standing against a defined rule, and log the decision in an audit trail. The Locate My Will build is a working production example of that pattern.
Recurring problems include verifying who has legal authority to make decisions, releasing sensitive records to some family members but not others, activating pre need contracts on a triggering event, coordinating communication across email and SMS at short notice, and maintaining audit trails that satisfy regulators. All of these are access control, workflow, and logging problems.
Yes. Automated audit logging captures logins, identity verification attempts, disclosure approvals and rejections, and account changes, giving administrators an audit ready record of every action taken on the platform.
The platform is a cloud based web application integrating Veriff for identity verification, Stripe for subscription billing and webhook driven account status sync, Amazon SES for transactional email, and Infobip for SMS, with a multi factor authenticated administrative portal.
Yes. Net Solutions works across the bereavement and estate services sector on identity verified access control, conditional disclosure logic, multi role family portals, subscription and pre need billing, and compliance audit logging. Get in touch to discuss your requirements.
Locate My Will works because of what it refuses to store, and because it never discloses to the wrong person or at the wrong time. If you are building for families after a death, whether that is arrangement workflows, family portals, pre need contracts, or estate administration, we can help you design around those constraints instead of patching over them. Start the conversation
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