Did you ever wonder what would happen to your stuff if you were to die tomorrow? I know, it’s morbid, but don’t tell me you’ve never thought about it.

Thankfully we have lawyers to help us navigate our plans for after death and put these worries at ease. With the help of our attorney, my husband and I set up our “pull-the-plug plan”, a revokable trust, and every document we need to protect our wishes and our assets if one of us should die tomorrow.

But what about protecting our digital property? You know, our online-only bank accounts, AJ’s portfolio of work, my photos, videos, writing, contacts, etc. I don’t know about you, but a lot of my most meaningful possessions aren’t in my office/studio or my bedroom- they’re in the cloud. And if I were to kick the bucket tomorrow? Yeah, they’d be gone and my whole digital footprint would just stop.

For this reason, I’m politely suggesting that my law student friends get savvy on Digital Property. There is an opportunity to influence significant changes by advising on and creating policies around ownership in digital space. The needs are ones we will all face at some point and yet there is still minimal talk about it, support for it, research around it, or firm legal rulings on it. If AJ needed access to my online-only savings account, where would he start? No one knows my passwords and I’m becoming less and less convinced that that’s a good (or realistic) thing. But who do I turn to for advice on all of this?

Digital Property is not only a concern for when we die. What about the Digital Property we own and control now? Copyright issues online are more complicated than ever. Outraged artists sparked a Terms of Use change for Pinterest and when it comes to social media, copyright and fair use of digital property lives in a legal grey area. Other recent issues have included employers requesting access to employee’s personal Facebook accounts, and Facebook is being cited as a problem in one third of divorces – raising even more questions around who should have ownership of or access to your accounts. At the very least, we are talking about serious issues of privacy that need to be addressed. But on a macro level, this is a first amendment and free speech dilemma.

The more our digital worlds become intertwined with our every day lives, the greater the need becomes to have experts decoding and policing issues. All I’m saying is that if I were in law school – I’d be jumping on this opportunity.