The days of shelling out $350 to $1000 an hour for a lawyer – plus $1 for every page photocopied by their minimum-wage-earning admin assistant – may soon be at an end. The legal sector is facing disruptive threats that are turning business models upside down.

"Across many industries we're seeing the simpler, lower-value activities digitally disrupted," says Wallace Fan, one of the three co-founders of Greatwill, an app that allows people to tap out their last will and testament on their mobile devices.

Katie Richards: Capitalising on the digital world. Credit:

"Almost half of all Australians pass away without a valid will and that's not just because we don't want to contemplate dying," says Fan. "It's time-consuming and expensive to meet with a lawyer. With our app there is an initial charge of $40 for the will and an annual stewardship fee of $4.99. Users enter all the standard information but there are lots of added features.

"You can record a video of yourself to be played after you've gone, you can make as many changes as you like whenever you like to your will at no extra cost, and everything is time-stamped and stored in our secure digital archive. We email users periodically and if we repeatedly fail to get a response we contact their executor. We ask the executor to check on the user and remind them that, if it's required, we have the most up-to-date of their will available."