Services for the Notary Office
Are you looking for a assistance at your office?
By choosing to temporarily staff your firm with freelance-notaries you enable your company to streamline the work load according to its business cycle in a cost-efficient manner.
Increasingly, experienced freelance-notaries are assuming additional tasks and supervisory responsibilities often being offered full time positions by the client. Performing interim services is an excellent method for the candidate and the client to get to know each other.
We offer skill trainings to enhance the qualifications of notaries.
Notaries occupy a special place in the world of legal professionals
The underneath text has been prepared by the Royal Dutch Notarial Society (KNB) to provide an introduction to the profession of notary (notaris) in the Netherlands. Notaries occupy a special place in the world of legal professionals in the Netherlands, alongside attorneys-at-law (advocaten), bailiffs (deurwaarders) and tax advisors (belastingconsulenten). This is apparent first and foremost from the way in which a notary is appointed and performs his duties. Like an attorney, a notary is a legal professional with clients who pay for his advice and services, but like a judge, a notary is appointed by the Crown for life (in other words until the age of retirement at 65). The permanence of the appointment is designed to safeguard the independence which a notary needs to perform his duties.
This brings us to a second important feature: a notary’s independence and, more importantly, his impartiality. Unlike an attorney-at-law or other legal advisor, a notary does not act for just one party. Instead, in the Dutch legal system, he is required to weigh up and balance the interests of all the parties to a legal transaction. A notary is, as it were, above the parties. For example, when real property is conveyed a notary acts for both the seller and the buyer. He has a duty of secrecy in relation to his clients and has the right to withhold information in court, in the same way as an attorney-at-law or a doctor. In cases where a notary nonetheless acts as legal advisor to a particular party to a transaction, he should make this sufficiently clear to all concerned. Here too, however, the notary should not neglect the interests of third parties.
All notaries are law graduates. Not only are they experts in family law, succession law, corporate law and property law, but they must also stay abreast of certain aspects of tax legislation and case law in so far as they relate to these fields. If necessary, a Dutch notary may coordinate the activities of other legal professionals. However, a notary does not represent clients in court.
Apart from providing legal advice, a notary also records agreements, either because the law requires it or at the parties’ request. The formal document drawn up by a notary, which is known as a notarial instrument, constitutes definite proof that the date and the parties’ signature are correct. A notary is required to retain the original instrument and to issue the parties with certified copies. A specially-endorsed copy, known as the execution copy, provides conclusive evidence of title in the same way as a court judgment. It follows that the holder of a notarial instrument need not conduct legal proceedings to prove the authenticity of an instrument. By contrast, a deed drawn up by an English solicitor is not treated as an authentic document and cannot therefore be executed as such in the Netherlands.
The new Notaries Act (Wet op het Notarisambt), which came into force on 1 October 1999 (156 years after the original Act), reinforces the official position of notaries, but also permits a freer market for the services they provide. The consolidation of the notary’s official position is, for example, reflected in the way the requirements of impartiality and independence have been enshrined in law, in the many regulations a notary and junior notary (kandidaat-notaris) are required to observe, and also in the fact that a notary is not permitted to act as an attorney-at-law. The introduction of market forces is reflected in the greater scope for junior notaries to become a notary and the greater scope for competition. However, the introduction of the new Notaries Act has left the system basically unchanged: the Dutch notary forms part of the Latin notarial profession. While he is granted authority to exercise official powers and the instruments drawn up by him have special evidential force in some respects, he is also an entrepreneur since he receives his fees not from the authorities but from his clients.
The new Act makes it easier for junior notaries wishing to set up a practice and allows notaries more freedom in the fees they are permitted to charge. The Act has provided for the establishment of an external committee of experts; if junior notaries can submit a sound business plan to this committee, they have more opportunity than before to set up their own practice. The greater freedom in the fees a notary is permitted to charge implies that the KNB no longer gives rules for fees or lays down recommended rates. Since 1 July 2003 notaries have been in principle free to set their own fees. Maximum rates fixed by the authorities now apply only to family law services in certain circumstances.