This potentially has some uses in some very rare circumstances, I would think for the most part, encrypting a document, and then shredding the key and giving each piece to a seperate individual would be more usefull. If you trust your crypto methode (ie use RSA 3DES or something else well published) then as long as your key generation algorithm is good you can publish your encrypted document in a public place, when event X happens (ie you die), everyone with a piece of your key gets together and unencrypts the doc.