Lawyers to verify electronic signatures
A new decree allowing lawyers (attorneys-at-law) to verify electronically signed documents should soon enter into force. This novelty will make life easier for (not only) entrepreneurs in business dealings.
The decree supplements the amendment to the Act on Legal Profession of July 2022, which introduced the possibility for a lawyer to make a declaration of authenticity of a signature also on an electronically signed document. However, until now no implementing regulation stipulated in more detail how the authentication should be performed and recorded or any related technical issues. This possibility therefore remained unused in practice.
Under the decree, a lawyer can verify:
- qualified and guaranteed electronic signatures (e.g. PostSignum, DocuSign) - in this case the lawyer shall check that the integrity of the document to which the signature is attached has not been violated (however, they do not have to check the certificate’s trustworthiness or expiry)
- simple electronic signatures (e.g. scans of a signature) if such a signature is visible directly in the document.
Requirements for electronic documents
The document on which the signature will be legalised can have a maximum size of 50 MB and must be in PDF/A format, a special type of PDF designed for the archiving of documents ensuring that the content of the document (including fonts, attachments, etc.) remains unchanged even after years. For the more modern PDF/A-3 version, which allows additional files to be added to the document, it is required that any attachments be in a format permitted for archiving documents under the decree on the filing service. At the same time, the document must not contain any malicious code that could compromise the lawyer's information systems or software.
Lawyers' procedure for legalisation
When verifying the electronic signature, lawyer shall attach to the document a clause declaring the authenticity of the signature, while the declaration shall also include an imprint of the document with the signature being legalised. The lawyer shall then affix their qualified electronic signature and qualified electronic time stamp to the document. The document with the declaration clause will then be forwarded to the client via a data box or data storage facility where the client can collect it.
The decree is to enter into force on 1 July 2025. Starting this summer, lawyers should thus be able to verify electronic signatures; this should mainly bring time, administrative, and financial savings for entrepreneurs.