| The top result brought me to a National forum with a drop-down menu for a given State. I selected Louisiana and there was only one post from over 10 years ago. The rest of the search results were past posts here on Notary Rotary. Those posts went back to 2009 with the most recent having been 2012. Those are posts that have the word Louisiana fully typed out and not abbreviated. I am a Newbie who was commissioned in early December and I have been studying from materials offered from Common Law States just because of the odds. This is the only Civil Law State in the country but just as I know from having studied for and passed the exam here, very few things are the same for a Notary under Civil Law and I come from Common Law States myself. I moved to Louisiana in 2006 and prior to that my career background was under Common Law. Indeed my entire life history was under Common Law. Everything about Civil Law is both foreign and fascinating because it is just so counter-intuitive to we Common Law peeps. All of the courses I have taken coming from Common Law States drive home some fundamental facts if you are a Common Law Notary such as not being allowed to suggest the type of wording, be it Jurat or Acknowledgement, whereas here it is incumbent upon us not only to know which is called for but to use the right wording for the given document and to even fix it if it is wrong. Needless to say I am surprised that there are no forums specifically for Louisiana Notaries because the language is so different in so many ways and I, having come from Common Law States, sure do have a bunch I could benefit from learning from Louisiana Notaries. Passing the exam was no small feat. It has an 18% pass rate and even then, many take it a number of times before they finally pass. Still, like all book education, it lays a foundation but it doesn't come close to parsing how Louisiana Signing Agents, specifically, interface with Lenders and Signing Services out of Common Law States. When reading over the posts from my google search I saw a number of times where the Louisiana Notary was explaining where they override instructions in order to conform to the Civil Code and they don't ask permission. It is just a given. Other times it depends on what the Lender wants, but you do need to call it to their attention if something doesn't conform to standard form and give them that option. It's quite a booger, as one poster referred to it, to perform a Louisiana signing. As much as we Common Law State folks need to have our wits about us, we Common Law State folks in a foreign Civil Law State have something like what appears to be a chaos to parse and unravel. I wonder if there is a reason why there are no Louisiana Notary forums. If anyone can find me one I'll bless you for having made the effort. Maybe I'm not as good as I think I am at formulating searches but I have been trying to connect with Louisiana Notaries online for close to a year now to no avail. Hope you all at least found this interesting in terms of insight into the different world of the Civil Law Notary. |
