Reading What You Are Signing

You can read the document in full before the session, and you should. Reading it for the first time on a video call, with a notary and possibly other people waiting, is nobody's idea of an informed signature.

Open it from your page. It is there from the moment you accept the invitation.

Why it is stamped DRAFT

The copy you can see before the end is stamped DRAFT — NOT YET NOTARISED, in large letters across every page. It stays stamped right through your session, including while you are signing it.

That is not a mistake and it is not a placeholder version. It is a truthful statement about what you are looking at: a document that has not been notarised. Until the notary applies their seal, it has no notarial effect whatsoever, whatever signatures are already on it.

The stamp is there because a part-signed document is genuinely dangerous if it escapes. A page carrying two real signatures looks, to anybody who was not involved, like a deed. The watermark means a screenshot of it cannot be passed off as one.

Why other people's signatures are already on it

If you are signing after somebody else, their signature will already be on the page when you open it. This is deliberate — you are entitled to see the document as it actually stands, not a blank version of it.

It does not mean the document is in force. Nothing is in force until everyone has signed and the notary has sealed it. Somebody else having signed commits them; it does not commit you, and you can still decline.

You cannot download it

There is no download button before the seal, and this is on purpose. The stamped copy is shown on screen and nowhere else.

A file, once downloaded, travels. It gets emailed on, saved to a shared drive, and eventually shown to somebody who reads two signatures and a formal-looking document and treats it as final. Keeping it on screen is the only reliable way to stop a half-executed deed circulating as a finished one.

If you need your own record of what you signed, you get it at the end — see below.

If the document is wrong

Say so before you sign, to the person who invited you or to the notary at the start of the session.

A notary cannot change the document for you, and neither can we. What they can do is stop the session. Signing something you believe to be wrong and raising it afterwards is much harder to undo — your signature will be on a notarised deed, attested by a notary who recorded that you signed it freely and having read it.

What you get at the end

When the last person has signed and the notary has sealed it, you are emailed:

• The sealed document, with every signature on it and the notary's seal
• The notarial certificate, which names each session, who appeared at it and when, and the notary who conducted it

Both arrive whichever session you attended, and both are yours to keep. The certificate is what somebody relying on the document checks; it carries a reference and a way of verifying that it is genuine.

Nothing is watermarked at that point. The stamp exists only for the versions that are not the real thing.