Business and Justice Info

The bill to modernize the judicial and legal professions regulated to enhance the legal profession and encourage them to work together to better meet the needs of users, the act should create a lawyer countersigned.
Stemming from the work of the Committee Darrois, the countersignature of a lawyer is to give it legal effect strengthened the private deed who is the object. In particular, the document will fully witness the signature and handwriting of the parties. For the Department of Justice, it is not possible also to allow bailiffs, whose mission and role are different from those of the lawyer, can countersign such an act.

Indeed, lawyers who have not received delegation of public power, the act does not countersigned not be enforceable, “said Minister of Justice, in a departmental response dated 10 June 2010. The legislature has since 1990, decided to entrust to the lawyer, in addition to its traditional business litigation, business legal advice including consultation and the drafting of an act involving the same plane the two essential components of the activity lawyers. If the legislature has considered it appropriate to place restrictions on the legal advice applied principally to all members of the judiciary and legal professions – given the requirements of the latter in terms of both experience and ethics of responsibility that – Lawyers are, among these professionals, the first editors of private documents, and are best placed, in the practice of their business litigation, to anticipate difficulties in implementation and execution of acts, which gives them experience and competency.

Regarding judicial officers, it is public and corporate officers whose duties are set by law and which have a monopoly on service of judicial and extrajudicial execution and writs of execution. The parcel of public power entrusted to them justifies some of the acts they stand are in the authentic form.
Consequently, if these professionals are authorized to write private documents, this activity is not intended to be their core business, and consider that allowing public officers and departmental countersign private documents in a purpose other than to give them authenticity, is likely to cause confusion in the minds of the public detriment in terms of readability of the right of individuals.
For all these reasons, the Department of Justice opposes any extension of the act countersigned, other than the legal profession.