The notary is much more than just a seal. The notary is a civil servant highly qualified in law whose role is quite delicate and consists of protecting and guaranteeing legal interests of the counterparties involved in a deed.

“Why a notary should be appointed?”. Many ask. The notary is a professional figure who provides citizens with greater reliability, efficiency and simplification in dealings with public administration, and who offers his or her expertise in order to better draft contracts in wich “public faith” is required. Therefore, the notary is an impartial guarantor that interprets and develops the counterparties’ intentions when they make a deal or put in place every act that affects their rights; the notary is economically responsible as well for the solidity of the contracts he or she drafts.

The choice of one specific notary should necessarily and primarily be based on a full trust relationship from both counterparties, that consider the notary as a “super partes” professional figure and as a guarantor of the legitimacy of their operation thanks to values such as professionalism, independence, competence and the ability to prevent conflicts of interests and to avoid disputes.

Fully according to this this approach, the Notary Office Auteri in Novara is also part of the select circle of professionals in Italy that founded the Notarial Quality Laboratory, which is an association aimed primarily at ensuring a high level of quality in the legal services they provide, by implementing processes and procedures to assure reliability to clients and to adopt strict internal controls over their methods and contents of their professional activity.

A notary is involved in a broad spectrum of legal matters: for example, he or she deals with inheritances, as a leading expert; is engaged in fields such as the circulation of real estate (houses, offices, land, warehouses, property belonging to individuals and businesses) and in many corporate activities and transactions along the entire company life-cycle. He or she deals  with generational change that for many companies or families turns out to be a dramatic step. He or she is also expert in trusts.

The notary in Italy is a civil servant established to draft in a legal form many deeds between living persons (such as sales, exchanges, divisions, mortgages, etc.), to receive people last wills (testaments), to attribute the necessary publicity for validity or opposability to third parties, preserve them, and issue copies, certificates (summaries), and extracts (partial copies) (art. 1 of the notary law).

The contract drafted by the notary is a public one; the notary is authorized by the Italian law to attribute “public faith” and a special legal effectiveness as well to it: everything the notary certifies in the notarial document (for example, that the contents have been read by the notary in presence of the counterparties, after having verified their intentions, or that a person has made or has signed a declaration in presence of the notary) is full proof, i.e., it must be considered true, even by a judge, unless the crime of forgery is established.

The general opinion about the role of the notary recalls two main elements.

The first element is trust, which stems from the impartiality of the notary, that means that all counterparties in the contract are protected; trust is also based on notary’s high level expertise in legal and fiscal matters thanks to a strong track-record in education; in the end it has to be remarked that the status as a civil servant makes the notary a guarantor of the truthfulness and legality of contracts.

The second element consists of the fact that the notary performs his or her function not as a state employee, but through a self-employed organization that ensures efficiency and reliability.

The speed of preparing legal documents and formalities, overcoming technical difficulties in a short time, and transmitting them electronically to public registers is facilitated by the ability to invest significantly in staff and in IT tools, ensuring security and efficiency for citizens and businesses.

In 1997, the Italian notary profession was the first professional category to establish insurance covering all its members, which became mandatory by law in 2006. This means that those who turn to a notary can be assured of full protection even in case of possible errors.

The regulated number of notaries in the Italian territory (notaries are limited in number due to the public function they perform and are tied to their assigned location, like judges, to ensure assistance across the entire territory, even the most disadvantaged) is synonymous with quality, as notaries enter the profession after extremely rigorous education and are recognized among the most qualified legal operators with high responsibilities.

The notary plays a significant social role in essential moments of a citizen’s life. The notary’s task is also to protect the most vulnerable people, to offer legal services and provide people who cannot afford the best lawyers or consultants with legal certainties; people who buy a house once in their life need someone able to guarantee the house is genuinely available, free from mortgages and other liabilities.

It is not by chance that if the parties use a notarynin an economic transaction, litigation in front of judges is very rare.

“The more notary, the less judge.” With these sentence, a famous jurist (Francesco Carnelutti) defined the essential function of the notary (i.e., the most important activity assigned to the notary by law). Notarial intervention serves as a preventive justice function that contributes to reducing disputes in a country like Italy, where there is a certain propensity for litigation, with the costs, risks, and time expenditure associated with legal proceedings.

For instance, in real estate transactions, one of the main notarial area of activity, the empirical evidence shows that legal disputes concern about 50 cases a year out of more than 1,700,000, equal to 0.0029% of total transactions.

To illustrate the prevention effect of notarial activity, it is noteworthy that the economic impact of civil litigation in Italy hovers around 1.7% of domestic GDP (according to Tillinghast’s report from 2005). This means that the better the notary performs his or her job—i.e., verifying and interpreting the intentions of the counterparties concluding a contract and drafting the relevant clauses clearly and in accordance with the law—the less there is need to resort to a judge (and the lower the risk that the notarial act will be a source of lawsuits).

Institutions have entrusted notaries with increasingly delicate tasks in recent years in activities such as combating illegal construction to real estate expropriations and acting as honorary judges to reduce the backlog in civil justice to overseeing the formation and minutes of companies to relieve judges of part of their workload; at an international level, the European anti-money-laundering law considers notaries an important category in the fight against money laundering—all without additional costs for the community.

The notary should be chosen by the counterparties by mutual agreement or, in the absence of agreement, by the one responsible for paying the fees and reimbursing the expenses incurred by the notary. The choice of the notary should be based on a relationship of trust. In general, the following drivers should be taken into account:

• The effort the notary personally put to ascertain clients’ needs, intentions and practical goals;
• The ability to give legal advice to clients and to guide them so that the form and content of the notarial act best protect their interests, considering the practical outcome they want to achieve;
• The way the notary pursues his or her job following the law, the best practices and the code of ethics, which includes correctness, diligence, and professional preparation, as well as the efficiency of the office organization.
• The availability to give clients an estimate of the professional fee when they explicitly ask for it. The estimate cannot be considered binding, as the actual complexity of the case can only be verified at the end of the legal procedure leading to the final result requested by the counteparties. The choice of the notary should not be determined solely by the cost level of the notarial service.

In order to get a comparison between different cost estimates, it is necessary to take into account many elements such as the way the notary carries on his or her activity, the time he or she dedicates to personal relationships with clients in order to better understand their needs and the efficiency of the office structure.

One might ask: but what is the purpose of the notary? In England or the United States, people can even buy a house on his or her own and the transaction is covered by insurance. But you have to notice that the cost of the solicitor, the lawyer you have to consult, is much higher than the cost of the notary; beyond this, insurance companies in many cases are reluctant to pay damages, and even if they do, they cannot guarantee the injured party that compensation will be equivalent, nor can they guarantee (for example, due to illegal construction) that it is possible to purchase the desired property.

In light of the above, the answer to the question “what is the purpose of the notary?” becomes clearer: the notary provides citizens with greater reliability, efficiency, and simplification in dealings with public administration and is a professional figure economically responsible for the solidity of the contracts he or she drafts.

The role of the notary takes various forms in different countries around the world. The function in different states varies according to their specific legal systems, but it is certainly possible to make a generic distinction between notaries in Common Law jurisdictions and notaries in Civil Law ones. Notaries in civil law jurisdictions make authentic legal documents and provide also to clients legal advice and protection of their economic interests.