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Posted by  JanetK_CA on 1/13/19 8:12pm
Yep. And some of us have been warning about this probability for a long time now (and were sometimes poo-pooed for being negative). I'd rather be wrong, when it comes to this issue, but it's clearly becoming more and more likely.
As for where we are today, BearPaw correctly makes the distinction between e-notarization and remote notarization, and on the determination of the supporters of the latter. As for the former, I believe e-notarization has been possible in CA since at least about 2 commissions ago for me.
Also on the remote notarization issue, I think we should all keep in mind that for that service to take over a major chunk of our business, it doesn't need to become legal within our own state. It just needs to be legal for documents notarized remotely (from anywhere else, but presumably within the US) to be accepted in our state. Maybe someone can clarify if there's even a way to know that a document was remotely notarized. Will those documents look any different than another document e-notarized? Do we even know what portion of our business has already been skimmed by these services?
If remote notarization DOES become legal in our own state, that will just give us the option of deciding if we want to make what I imagine would be the rather significant investment in: 1) web camera equipment, 2) the software required for what will presumably be access to Knowledge Based Authentication (KBA) for identification of signers, 3) whatever additional screening will be required to be *allowed* to buy that software, 4) some kind of hardware or service for very secure, long term storage of the videos of every transaction notarized, etc., etc... I've long suspected this could price out the vast majority of sole-proprietor type notary services that most of us provide.
BTW, I think that at least the topic of the article in the OP is very work-related. So yes, let's continue to try to make an effort to have threads here be to "Discuss Work", but I'd suggest we not be so quick to pull the trigger to complain. I personally don't find it that difficult to skip over threads that don't interest me.
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