Civil-law notaries, or Latin notaries, are lawyers of noncontentious private civil law who draft, take, and record legal instruments for private parties, provide legal advice and give attendance in person, and are vested as public officers with the authentication power of the State. As opposed to most notaries public, their common-law counterparts, civil-law notaries are highly trained, licensed practitioners providing a full range of regulated legal services, and whereas they hold a public office, they nonetheless operate usually—but not always—in private practice and are paid on a fee-for-service basis. They often receive generally the same education as attorneys at civil law with further specialized education but without qualifications in advocacy, procedural law, or the law of evidence, somewhat comparable to solicitor training in certain common-law countries.
Civil-law notaries are limited to areas of private law, that is, domestic law which regulates the relationships between individuals and in which the State is not directly concerned. The most common areas of practice for civil-law notaries are in residential and commercial conveyancing and registration, contract drafting, company formation, successions and estate planning, and powers of attorney. Ordinarily, they have no authority to appear in court on their client's behalf; their role is limited to drafting, authenticating, and registering certain types of transactional or legal instruments. In some countries, such as the Netherlands, France, Italy, or Québec (Canada) among others, they also retain and keep a minute copy of their instruments—in the form of memoranda—in notarial protocols, or archives.
Notaries generally hold undergraduate degrees in civil law and graduate degrees in notarial law. Notarial law involves expertise in a broad spectrum of private law including family law, estate and testamentary law, conveyancing and property law, the law of agency, and contract and company law. Student notaries must complete a long apprenticeship or articled clerkship as a trainee notary and usually spend some years as a junior associate in a notarial firm before working as a partner or opening a private practice. Any such practice is usually tightly regulated, and most countries parcel out areas into notarial districts with a set number of notary positions. This has the effect of making notarial appointments very limited.
Notarial instruments
As a lawyer, a civil-law notary draws up and executes legal instruments called notarial instruments (Fr acte notarié, Sp instrumento notarial, It atto notarile, Du notariële akte, Ger notarielle Urkunde, Notariatsurkunde). To be valid, a notarial instrument must be signed contemporaneously (uno contextu) by the (parties to the instrument), sometimes in the presence of attesting witnesses, before the notary who also signs and officiates the signing ceremony.
Status at law
Notarial instruments, if prima facie duly executed, are: presumed valid and regular; self-authenticating; probative (i.e., proof of their contents); public; self-executing; and have a data certa, i.e., a fixed, unalterable effective date. Traditionally, notarial instruments trigger a entailing two consequences—regularity and probativity. First, being an official act, a presumption of regularity attaches to the instrument, meaning all prescribed formalities have been carried out, including the reading over of the instrument. Second, a notarial instrument is self-authenticating and probative, i.e., it constitutes full proof of the agreement it contains, as against the parties, their heirs, and successors. It also means the notary's firsthand (de visu et auditu suis sensibus) narrations of fact are conclusively presumed true and correct, whereas secondhand narrations (appearers' representations) are merely assertio notarii which are rebuttably presumed valid. While all notarial instruments are official documents, they are not all necessarily public; most instruments are in public form, meaning an original is retained in publica custodia by the notary in his or her protocol or recorded with a public registry, but some are in private form, that is, a single original is issued directly to the . In either case, the appearer always walks away with an instrument that is self-executing, that is, it requires no further implementing action to be effective and enforceable, just like a court order. Finally, notarial instruments have a fixed effective or signature date (data certa) that cannot be ante- or postdated, or left blank and filled in after signing.