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Posted by  JanetK_CA on 10/12/17 3:35pm
I ran into one of those once many years ago. I don't remember all the details, but it stuck in my mind because they wanted to leave the Grantee blank, and I wasn't about to notarize that way. While I understand their reasoning, I believe that kind of a process is just lazy. It's an invitation for fraud and is asking for a whole lot of trust on the part of the Grantor and the notary. For all we know, someone could put their own name in as Grantee. As I recall, I left a very unhappy client, as well - and may have lost lots of future business.
But those things sometimes do come back to haunt us long after we thought we were done with it. This isn't exactly the same kind of situation, but I recently got a call from an attorney's office about a notarization I did months ago. Apparently, the legal description for a Deed was either misplaced or incorrect and was rejected by the County Recorder. They were asking me to just send them another notary acknowledgment so they could resubmit it. I was rushing out the door, so I didn't hear everything she said, but there might have been some request also about changing the date...
My immediate response was that I couldn't just send a loose acknowledgment, so the caller told me she was a notary, too, and it was OK 'cause she had checked with the NNA, blah, blah, blah... LOL! I just said that I didn't catch everything she said but would address it as soon as I was done with the appointment I was heading to and could she please just put the details into an email to me.  Naturally, by the time I was done with my appointment, I had another email from her saying that they decided to just have the two parties re-acknowledge the Deed. So far, that's always worked for me!
Of course, that kind of an approach doesn't help when we're sitting face to face with the signers (and possibly a client). But, as Teresa well knows, we still shouldn't let ourselves be intimidated into doing something that's illegal in our state. The notary I spoke to probably knew it wasn't her name on that acknowledgment and not her commission at risk... Any of us who have been in this field for a while know that illegal requests are not unusual and we have to be willing to stand our ground. If it's not illegal in your state, then you have a judgment call to make.
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