Family Archival Solutions | Protect Your Legacy
When a loved one passes away, their legacy is left behind. The wills and other private forms belonging to an individual are easily lost, causing undue stress and conflict between family members. As technology advances, many things are going digital and some are only offered as an online component. Emails, documents, and even tax forms are handled online, making it difficult for families to retrieve them, or even know they existed in the first place.
Family Archival Solutions proposes the idea of individually preserving one’s legacy through an online cloud storage system retrievable only by certain personnel. This way, a person can leave behind a will including their tax forms, emails, and other digital and physical documents family members wouldn’t have known about. And if you want to keep physical copies of important documents safely, then you might want to consider using mailing tubes for safe keeping.
Founder of Family Archival Solutions, Mark Nicholas, talks with TechZulu about LA, startups, and Family Archival Solutions.
Tell us a little about yourself.
MN: I am the founder of a company call Family Archival Solutions. It was created to protect families in particular: their legacies, their assets, and documents; ultimately reducing family stress and conflict, saving time, and tremendous expense. I have an extreme amount of experience in the legal world, particularly trying to get families the assets to which they are entitled. In addition to general estate work, I work with financial institutions. In some problematic cases, families have not prepared a will and nothing was documented, instructions were unclear, or there was a lack of knowledge regarding what it meant to preserve digital assets. What we tried to do was create a company that could fix all this.
When my father passed away we experienced all these problems first hand. For instance, he was meticulous about creating a Quicken account and managing his financial affairs through it. But because it was password protected, we had no way of accessing that and it was ultimately lost. Through the digital age we have a set of historical issues that we can talk about.
The main purpose for your company is to protect a family’s legacy?
MN: In a sense, yes. When I think about what a person’s legacy is, I think of it not only as the intangible component of who they want to be remembered as, but also making sure all of their wishes can be enforced and that their assets can be protected. Experts say that estate planning is a very personal act. By doing so, we also have the ability to protect the entire family’s integrity. If you have questions about estate planning, then you might want to consider consulting a professional estate planning attorney.
If we can reduce stress and conflict, if we can speed up the process, if we can make sure accounts can be quickly located and get those assets out as quickly as possible or help them escape the estate process to do that, then essentially we are not only protecting the individual’s legacy; we are protecting the entire family’s ability to stay connected and cohesive and preserving the family’s integrity as well.
Are you doing all this digitally?
MN: When we think about how to build a company that can really help the family or the individual, I think we have to look at the entire process. The problems that families are facing now do not start with technology, they’ve gone on for centuries. A family that doesn’t write down their instructions or their assets doesn’t make things easy, especially when the spouse that took care of things dies. It really leaves families in a lurch. Some have lost documents forever.
When Congress passed the electronic signatures act, it did not include estate documents, they’re still not allowed to be digital in most jurisdictions. Physical documents are getting lost at an astounding rate; with problems ranging from not knowing which attorney might be holding them or storms damaging them. We started with the premise that we have to rectify many of the historical problems in addition to the ones that are more modern and technologically based.
We actually have a state of the art solution to bring in those physical documents, so families can store their will and trusts in a way that will be preserved, protected, and easily found. In addition to that, we are also scanning documents and allowing families to upload them to our site. We are so much more than cloud storage because we take claims. We’ll make sure important documents can be located and also have them delivered. We’re handling both the physical as well as the digital storage of documents.
What other problems are you looking to solve with Family Archival Solutions?
MN: If we were to look at a handful of historical problems – none of which have been fixed – they all fit as an overlay to the problems we’re facing today. A majority of families never create a will or an estate plan (check out experts like Cunningham Legal for professional guidance). Sometimes an attorney who was storing a legal document has retired, sold their practice, passed away first, or the family simply doesn’t know who that lawyer is. There’s also confusion around when documents were created and whether there were any proper witnesses. But then you have other things like inexperienced executors or families that have a conflict or are fighting over assets.
A lot of these issues have plagued families. Now there’s an additional overlay. In the old days, the family could sit by the mailbox and wait for a bank statement to arrive. But technology is replacing that with email notifications. A family that is not familiar with some of these affairs may never know that an account exists.
What we have is this historical problem where the family’s value, in particularly their intangible values, are being moved into the electronic world. Their photos, videos, and documents are being moved into cloud-storage; third-party storage. Or it is left on the individual’s computer which is password protected and ultimately lost if there’s a crash. Cloud-storage was not designed for this; it was designed for personal accounts. The estate issues are now a whole new problem, in terms of trying to find that.
We’re going after it all; whether it’s physical or digital, we’re trying to get to the assets inventory. We’re not targeting some niche here; we’re targeting the estate process, so that it’s a complete solution in terms of planning. It will be more helpful then a simple will with no information, it’s going to be a remarkable amount of information for families to utilize quickly and easily.
Do you think technology is creating new problems for families?
MN: Yes, in the sense that information is being moved online and information is being transferred electronically so that families lose track of information or worse, so that information is completely lost behind the technology. I think we are the only company who can probably claim this. We’re trying to utilize technology, so it purely benefits the family. We didn’t just create some storage facility for passwords. We didn’t just create an online list; you can do that everywhere. What we wanted to do was create a tool that plugs into the estate process and makes life easy. If we can find the assets and accounts inventory for the documents, we can manage some of the other shortcomings that might happen whether it’s a family’s decisiveness or experience or something else. We can start to fix that because a family will have everything they need in one package. That’s why we created reports, specifically designed for estate administration. If we were to receive a notification from a client who has authorized the estate or court we can generate a report to make the family’s life easy. In that sense we are utilizing that technology purely for the benefit of the family.
I do think that technology made it harder. The cloud-storage is fantastic. I utilize it, I use Google Drive, Amazon, and even Dropbox, which are fantastic technologies. The problem is if something happens to me, my family is not designed to gain access to it. By utilizing that and scanning all my documents, it’s essentially hiding them from my family.
How do you deal with hacking and identity theft and what’s your solution?
MN: When a company comes along that’s designed to store passwords, what they’re largely doing is promoting identity theft. In connection with the estate process, it can get even worse. If somebody passes away or is incapacitated, the account is supposed to be frozen. Having the password alone contributes to the conflict.
We shouldn’t give out the passwords. I’ve got more than 20 years of experience as an attorney, I know what the banks need to deal with an estate, they don’t need somebody to come in and sneak through with a password. They need to be notified of the event. Once they’re notified, they will give all of the information necessary in order to get that estate or those accounts administered. The most important component for the family is reducing identity theft, and getting the problem solved to make sure the family calls the particular institution. If you were to look at our estate reports, they don’t include passwords for financial institutions at all.
What were the hardest times you had building this company?
MN: I think when it comes time to build something, we believe is pretty new and innovative, it’s sort of a collision of two worlds. A collision of a tech world, that largely is fantastic at storing stuff through cloud storage and this ability to not be tied to any one location and being mobile. It’s just amazing. But there’s a collision between that and the legal world, the estate world or the crisis world. Where if you’re really going to do it right, you focus on integrity and it can’t be data in and data out. It has to be a very careful application of how information is shared and that’s complicated.
My partner Randall is a tech and security expert. We needed to figure out, through technology, how to solve very complicated legal concerns. It wasn’t so much a question about how to build it, but how to design it, and we’re using technology to solve a practical, every day problem.
Like I’ve said, we’re not targeting technology. We’re not targeting passwords being lost. We’re targeting the fixing of many of the problems that have become inherent in the estate process. They’ve destroyed families for centuries and they will continue to destroy families unless we can figure out how to create a solution that becomes part of the process.
What were the good times of building your company?
MN: I would say the most wonderful benefit of creating this company is that is we get to be an advocate for the family. We get to stand up on a soap box and say that we can help you. We can not only save your family a lot of stress and conflict, but a ton of money and help preserve the family unit. This lets us offer not only solutions, but it also lets us educate.
Our focus on helping families has really made this process something we could embrace, that kept us going through the challenges of trying to come up with the right way to do it.
How do you view LA’s tech scene?
MN: From everything we can gather, LA has a vibrant community. I think this is common in a lot of places in this world; we’ve got so many smart people, creative people, folks that are inspired to do something meaningful. I feel like we are surrounded by that and I think that’s wonderful. Whether it’s meeting with other CEOs locally or some of the investors, I just view this as a fantastic area. We are proud to be here.
What help would you give to those for other startups?
MN: The process of putting something together, especially something that strives to have a meaningful impact on the world. One family at a time. Creating anything involves late nights, involves hard thought, and a lot of creativity. That requires real commitment, dedication and tremendous perseverance. It doesn’t come easy, there’s a reason why the whole world doesn’t do this. It requires something very special and that’s just a willingness to not give up.
I believe we were value-driven from the very beginning and I don’t want families to go through what I’ve seen through practicing law, but also what my own family went through. If I can solve that for one family, then it was worth putting this together. But now I’m looking at the world and we can solve this for a lot more than one family. We could solve this for millions of families. We can do great things. I think knowing that in the back of our minds allowed us to persevere and really fight through and put something together we knew would be a great solution.
Thank you for your time Mark.
