Writing a will is more than signing your life away, it is equally important to ensure your family gets the benefits due to them as you wish. That is why it is so important to write one.

In the past three months Consumer Line has received a number of complaints from readers who are having protracted battles finalising deceased estates, and in most cases it is when the deceased has left an unsigned scrap of paper or a trail of changed and improperly signed wills.

Some relatives fight over wills that the deceased changed and signed on his or her deathbed.

A unique complaint came from Wanda Manzini, whose parents have died. Manzini, of Umbumbulu, a rural area 40km from Durban, is contesting a will which her step- mother produced months after her father's death.

Manzini, 32, said her mother died when she was a teenager and her father later married another woman in community of property.

Her father had two shops, a petrol station and two houses. One of the houses was in her mother's name and it was never transferred into her father's name because there was no dissolution of her mother's estate after her death.

Her father died last year without making a will. "He believed in witchcraft, and the thought of writing one made him think he could soon be killed for his wealth," Manzini said.

Six months after his death the family was doing a cleansing ceremony when her stepmother turned up with an unsigned will she allegedly got from Manzini' s father's e-mail box when she was clearing old documents.

A worried Manzini wanted to know if the unsigned will which was e-mailed to her father was legally binding. "I'm his only child. My father would not exclude me and bequeath all his estate to his second wife," Manzini said.

Consumer Line spoke to Sizwe Snail, an attorney and co-author of Cyber Law @ SA 111,about the validity of electronic wills.

Snail said there are no valid electronic wills in SA in terms of the Electronic Communication Transaction (ECT) Act.

He said although there is a law governing electronic data message transmissions, it is not possible to use the data messages as a method of executing a valid will.

This is strictly prohibited by the ECT act, he said. For a will to be valid it must be in writing, signed, attested to by two witnesses and each page must be initialed by the testator (the deceased).

"This means the use of an e-mail does not satisfy the requirements of a valid will and even partial compliance of the provisions of the Wills Act render the will void from the beginning," he said.

Snail said the case of Macdonald v The Master was the only exception where an invalid will was condoned by the court. In this case the court held that a draft will in the form of an electronically stored document on a hard computer disk could be condoned in terms of the Wills Act even though the statutory requirements were not being met.

- In this case Malcolm Scott Macdonald committed suicide and left a handwritten note dated December 13 2000 on a bedside table.

The note read that his last will and testament could be found on his PC. The Master of the High Court initially rejected this due to its invalidity but this was later condoned when it was proved that the deceased's suicide note led them to the PC he alone had access to.