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There have been quite a few posts about a land surveyor signing and sealing a digital drawing, whether that is a drawing of an individual lot, a plat of a subdivision, or something else. Vermont is revising its notarization law to allow notarization of electronic documents, and the electronic notarization could be either in-person or the notary and signer could be in different places and communicate online. This last option is often called remote online notarization, or RON.
My impression is that notaries rarely conduct in-person electronic notarization, but RON is starting to become popular. I've never done it, but it appears that the platforms, such as DocuSign, that support RON allow a few file types as input (.pdf, .doc, .jpeg, a few more) and always provide PDFs as output.
It appears that if you wanted to digitally sign and notarize a digital drawing in a rich, powerful format such as .dwg, you would first have to convert it to pdf, which would seriously reduce what the recipient could do with it.
My question is whether you see a use case for notarizing a full-featured digital drawing like a .dwg? If the law and rules were written in a way that made it impossible to notarize a .dwg or similar file, would that bother you?
Posted : April 8, 2022 7:53 am
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Certifying / Signing anything that is editable (like a DWG) just seems like a bad idea. I know a PDF is getting more easily editable, but it just seems like there are to many ways to screw up a DWG.
I do think firms that recognize this is coming and take measures to assure that all linework is good and that all CYA notes are in place will be able to deliver such a product. Good topic!
Posted : April 8, 2022 8:15 am
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@ppm How land surveyors and other design professionals are allowed to sign electronic drawings are all over the lot (pun intended). There are some methods of signing that are legal but would leave the drawing vulnerable to undetectable alteration. Some of the states that haven't updated their notary laws to account for the Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act have the same problem with electronic notarization. But the states that have passed electronic notarization law updates require notaries to use tamper-evident technology when notarizing. So any alternations should cause the drawing to display that the signature is invalid.
That said, drawings often incorporate elements that are not contained within the file that contains the drawing. One would have to investigate each drafting application to see if undetected changes could be introduced by making a change to a file that is referred to in the main drawing file.
Posted : April 8, 2022 8:45 am