The Notary Before and Now
By Jonathan A. Pabillore & Dominique Marie Akio Therese P. Gana-Pabillore
In 2025, the Supreme Court came out with a refreshed set of guidelines and rules for electronic notarization. These latest rules promise to upend the notarial industry, boasting convenience and expediency. To understand these new rules, it will be helpful to look through the evolution of notarial practice and how other jurisdictions have formed their own notarial practice.
In the UK, to be a notary requires extensive training2, because their primary role is to authenticate documents for foreign jurisdictions3. In the US, you don’t have to have legal training, not even a degree, to qualify as a notary public4. Their role is also to authenticate documents, but for domestic use. Their seal guarantees the writing in question belongs to and was executed by its author or signatory. Nevertheless, notarial practice does not form a major part, if at all, of U.S. legal practice5. It, therefore, comes as a surprise that the Philippine Supreme Court, in its new rules, chose the U.S. as our most compatible jurisdiction6. Maybe we look to them for their technical innovations and “similar” practices. Although, a jurisdiction whose notaries do not have to be lawyers or even posses much in the way of legal knowledge could not be more different to ours7.
The Philippines still requires notaries public to be lawyers, but not all lawyers can be, or wish to be a notary8. You must obtain a special commission from a court to be one and the office carries with it certain powers and responsibilities9. These powers consist in the ability to perform certain notarial acts. In the history of notarial practice across the world, notaries performed several functions. In one incarnation, they were public officers (commonly, notaries in the Philippines are technically also “public officers,” but more strictly they are commissioned lawyers in private practice) who served on behalf of the monarchy10. Notaries for the Spanish monarchy, for instance, carried the King’s decrees across Spain’s colonies11. In another, they drew private agreements and authenticated them with their official seals. Spain had these types of notaries, apart from those that served as government clerks12.
The most common historical role for notaries was to certify or authenticate documents. This dates all the way back to the Roman Empire, where notaries were once referred to as “Tabellio,” because they wrote on tables13. When parties came to a disagreement, the notary was called upon to authenticate the written contract14. Notarized documents did not automatically become public documents even with the notary’s seal or certificate. They only did if the instrument was publicly registered. Today, the essence of this specific function—recording instruments and authenticating documents—has changed little over time, at least in our jurisdiction. But unlike their earliest predecessor, notarized documents now are, by definition, public documents, meaning they are self-authenticating documents. Whereas, private writings must meet a higher threshold to be admitted as evidence in court, public documents are often readily accepted. The other historical function of writing contracts and agreements for parties15, which requires legal knowledge, did not survive the modern evolution of the Philippine notary. Their functions, especially after America took the reins from Spain as our colonizer, became more clerical.
The earliest law on notaries in the Philippines was the 1889 Spanish Notarial Law16. After the Americans assumed control, the Administrative Code of 1917 superseded that. And between 1917 and 2003, Philippine notarial law remained unchanged. The next iteration came in 2004, this time not from the legislature, but from the Supreme Court. The 2004 Rules on Notarial Practice (2004 Rules) became the comprehensive guide for the profession.
The discussion below recalls and focuses on the relevant and most important aspects of the 2004 Rules, which will also help us understand the changes from the 2025 Rules on Electronic Notarization.
A. Notarial Acts
The 2004 Rules outlines and defines the notary’s various powers, which are the following:
Acknowledgement
A person acknowledges a document when they admit that they executed and signed it of their own free will. You will usually find these in contracts. A party’s signature stands in for their consent and so when they acknowledge a document they are essentially admitting to binding themselves to that piece of writing.
Oath/Affirmation and Jurat
These are listed as two separate acts, but they often if not always come together in practice. An oath or affirmation just means a party swears to the truth of the document’s contents. If a party takes an oath and is later proven to have lied, they become liable for perjury.
A jurat not only requires the principal to swear an oath, but also to sign the document in front of the notary, whereas in an oath or affirmation, you can technically come with a pre-signed document. In either case, both acts ask the principal to vouchsafe the truth of their statements.
You will find an oath or jurat in documents stating facts or assertions. For example, when you crash your car, your insurance company might ask you to submit an affidavit recalling the circumstances that lead to or caused it. If you say your car had failed, but the insurance company’s investigation finds that you had been drunk, that will invalidate your claim and expose you to criminal prosecution. An oath or affirmation is supposed to be a legal guarantee against falsity or perfidy. It’s a more formal “cross my heart and hope to die.”
As mentioned earlier, an oath and a jurat are two separate notarial acts, but in practice you will almost always only see a jurat. For instance, a judicial affidavit specifically requires a jurat17. However, you will struggle to find documents requiring only an oath. In most cases, like in ordinary affidavits (an affidavit of loss, for example), the law and the rules are silent. And definitions don’t clarify much. Webster’s, for example, defines an affidavit as “a sworn statement in writing made especially under oath or on affirmation before an authorized magistrate or officer.”18 Is the writing and oath made before the magistrate—that is, requiring a jurat—or just the oath? Black’s law dictionary, on the other hand, says that an affidavit is “[a] written or printed declaration or statement of facts, made voluntarily, and confirmed by the oath or affirmation of the party making it, taken before an officer having authority to administer such oath.”19 That reads as someone coming to a notary with a pre-signed document and is only there to swear to its truth. But many lawyers would insist that all affidavits require a jurat.
Both acts only differ in ceremony, but not in their essence, so in practice it’s probably best to stick with a jurat whenever you submit and affidavit for notarization.
Signature witnessing
Foreign jurisdictions take this to mean that a third person has to witness the principal or author sign the document, and they themselves have to sign as proof of that fact.20 But signature witnessing has a different definition under Philippine law. The 2004 Rules on Notarial Practice defines this as a principal signing the document in front of the notary—in other words, it’s the notary witnessing the principal sign. The foreign definition and practice makes more sense, because we do find a lot of documents with spaces for witness signatures and the name sort of implies it. Moreover, certain legal documents require that formality, as in notarial wills, where the testators and witnesses must sign in each other’s presence.
Copy Certification
For some reason this hasn’t seen much use. Some notaries will downright refuse to do this. It’s probably because it’s an unfamiliar practice. It could also be because any time a document was litigated in court, like a contract, the Best Evidence Rule at that time called for the presentation of the original. Many government agencies also insisted either on an original, a certified true copy (from a government agency), or a simple copy, leaving this practice very little room for application.
Whatever the case, copy certification is when a notary supervises the copying of an original private document and certifies that the copy is a faithful reproduction of its original.
Other Acts
Notaries also have other lesser-known powers. Under the 2004 Rules, they can certify unconventional signatures like a thumbmark, and they can also sign on behalf of a person who cannot physically sign the document.
In exchange for these powers, notaries must perform certain obligations. The most prominent is reporting and furnishing the commissioning court with all their notarized documents for the past month. That is why notaries will often require several copies, because they need to reserve one for themselves and for the court.
That is the primary difference between jurisdictions where notaries are an entrenched part of legal practice. Countries where notaries don’t play a major part in legal transactions, like the U.S., won’t have much in the way of public records of private transactions.
For those jurisdictions where notarization is a major component of everyday life, the practice has yielded surprising benefits outside of law. Notarial records from the past have become a rich resource for historians. It offers a colorful glimpse into the kinds of transactions and matters that people dealt with in the past.21
B. Regular Place of Business
The 2004 Rules restricts notaries in their functions to their regular place of business. In “certain exceptional occasions or situations”— notaries, at the request of parties, may perform notarial acts outside this, but only in the following places:
Public offices, convention halls, and similar places where oaths may be administered;
Public function areas in hotels and similar places for the signing of instruments or documents requiring notarization;
Hospitals and other medical institutions where a party to an instrument or document is confined for treatment; and
Any place where a party to an instrument or document requiring notarization is under detention.
We don’t know why these restrictions were introduced. Perhaps because of sham notarial shops under the proverbial MRT or LRT station. If so, the Rules don’t appear to have deterred them. In any case, these are serious limitations and excludes important scenarios where a party may genuinely need a notary and still won’t fall under the exceptions. For example, someone who’s bedridden and can’t stay in a hospital for confinement may want to execute a notarial will and unless the fourth exception were to be stretched to mean someone who’s detained for whatever reason, as opposed to being imprisoned, then they cannot seek notarial services. Even when they aren’t tied down, persons with disabilities may find it genuinely difficult to avail of notarial services. There’s no good reason to prohibit a notary from going to them, instead of the other way around. The previous law only prohibited notaries from rendering services outside the commissioning court’s territorial jurisdiction and didn’t find the need to narrow down specific venues.22
C. Common Elements
While each notarial act has its nuances, they also share common elements. All of them require the principal to personally appear before the notary. They should also be personally known to the notary. If not, they must show competent evidence of their identity. This may consist in an official government ID. If one does not have a government ID, which is more common in the Philippines than one thinks, they can offer one disinterested witness who knows both the principal and the notary and swears an oath; or two disinterested witnesses who both know the principal, but not the notary, and can themselves offer competent evidence of their identity.
There is a conundrum here because the Rules forgot to define knowledge of an individual. How long must a person have “known” another and to what degree. What are the odds that someone who doesn’t have official identification will also be in the company of others in the same predicament? Common sense examples don’t present any difficulty—a friend or a years-long acquaintance can, of course, be a witness to your identity—but fringe cases are more complicated. Is it enough to meet a person for a day to “know” them? Is it even necessary to meet them? Can we be a witness to a celebrity whom we “know” through television or the internet? That determination will most likely come down to the convergence of several factors, but because there is no defined standard, interpretation can have a lot of wiggle room.
D. Notaries
The 2004 Rules strictly apply to commissioned private lawyers. As mentioned earlier, in the past, most notaries were public officers, as in government employees. For instance, the Revised Administrative Code of 1917 had “notaries public ex officio,” referring to government employees who could perform notarial functions:
(a) The Chief of the Division of Archives, Patents, Copyrights, and Trademarks; the Clerk of the. Supreme Court, the Clerk of the Court of First Instance of the Ninth Judicial District, the Chief of the General Land Registration Office, and the Superintendent of the Postal Savings Bank Division, Bureau of Posts – when acting within the limits of the City of Manila.
(b) Clerks of Courts of First Instance outside of the City of Manila, when acting within the judicial districts to which they respectively pertain.
(c) Justices of the peace, within the limits of the territory over which their jurisdiction as justices of the peace extends; but auxiliary justices of the peace and other of who are by law vested with the office of justice of the peace ex officio shall not, solely by reason of such authority, be also entitled to act in the capacity of notaries ex officio.
(d) Any government officer or employee of the Department of Mindanao and Sulu appointed notary public ex officio by the Judge of the Court of First Instance, with jurisdiction co-extensive with the province wherein the appointee is stationed, and for a term of two years beginning upon the first day of January of the year in which the appointment is made.
However, when the Administrative Code was revised in 1987, this provision disappeared. Now, the only notarial act public officers can administer is an oath. Most officers will have limited authority to do so, but these ones are given a broader power:
“The following officers have general authority to administer oath: Notaries public, members of the judiciary, clerks of courts, the Secretary of the either House of the Congress of the Philippines, of departments, bureau directors, registers of deeds, provincial governors and lieutenant-governors, city mayors, municipal mayors and any other officer in the service of the government of the Philippines whose appointment is vested in the President.”
The revisions to the Administrative Code have, therefore, concentrated the powers of commissioned notaries.
E-Notary Rules
For more than two decades, the 2004 Rules alone governed notarial practice in the country. Then on 04 February 2025, the Supreme Court approved their new rules on Electronic Notarization (EN Rules), which should be fully implemented this coming October 2026. The new rules do not replace the 2004 Rules, rather they add new dimensions to it.
Electronic notarization (EN) centers around electronic documents. It’s not about remotely notarizing physical documents with the assistance of electronic tools. For instance, a principal cannot mail a physical document to a notary and appear through videoconferencing as the notary performs the requested notarial act. The new EN Rules are about electronic documents (in PDF format). That is why EN can still be done both in-person and remotely.
Principals and notaries, however, must conduct their transactions through a comprehensive platform, which the Supreme Court refers to as an “Electronic Notarization Facility (ENF).” An ENF must be able to meet the requirements of each notarial act and guarantee the integrity of notarized electronic documents. These notarized documents will bear the hallmarks of a valid notarization, such as an Electronic Notarial Seal and Notarial Certificate, basically the electronic counterparts that you would find on any notarized document, except anyone now will be able to quickly verify and validate the notary’s credentials.
A. Notarial Acts
The EN Rules carry over most of the notarial acts under the 2004 Rules. An electronic notary may administer an oath or affirmation; acknowledgement; jurat; and signature witnessing electronically. It, however, removes any mention of copy certification—maybe because the new 2019 Rules on Evidence have redefined what an “original” document means, but this is for another topic.
There is also a new type or method for notarizing electronic documents. A principal abroad may now request for Philippine notarial services, provided they do so inside a Philippine embassy or consular office. This will be a huge boon to practicing lawyers here in the Philippines. Instead of requesting for an apostille, a lawyer can simply ask their client to avail of electronic notarization.
B. Regular Place of Business
Obviously with remote notarization, it has become irrelevant, to some extent, where the notary exercises their powers or where the principal is at any given time. They should still generally both be in the Philippines. The ENF should have geolocation security features that can catch any attempts at foiling this limitation.
For in-person electronic notarizations, the Supreme Court has also lifted the restrictions to a notary’s regular place of business. The new EN Rules give parties wider latitude and freely allow them to choose any venue, for as long as “the professional, private, and confidential nature of the electronic notarial act is maintained.”
Unfortunately, though, the EN Rules exclude notarial wills, depositions, and physical documents with wet signatures, so certain scenarios, particularly those we mentioned earlier, will continue to fall through the cracks.
C. Notaries
The Supreme Court, through an Electronic Notarization Administrator, will be accrediting electronic notaries under the EN Rules. Regional Trial Courts will still continue to commission traditional notaries under the 2004 Rules. This is meant to match the expanded jurisdiction of this new crop of notaries. Because they can now notarize for anyone in the country, the commissioning court should also be one whose jurisdiction spans the entire nation.
The Supreme Court will also be maintaining a publicly-accessible roster of commissioned lawyers, so those seedy LRT or MRT notaries may finally be on their way out.
These Rules are certainly a welcome addition to the notarial practice. Businesses, who regularly sign or execute contracts, prepare reportorial requirements, or otherwise deal in notarized documents, should no longer struggle to find available notaries, least of all worry about whether they are bringing their documents to a genuine notary. That is, of course, if things run smoothly. The Philippines, largely because of the reticence of government agencies to fully accept the increasing digital nature of transactions, has been very slow in adopting technology otherwise pervasive and well understood in other countries.
We have had the E-Commerce Act since 2000, which promised the legality and enforceability of electronic contracts and electronic signatures, but any lawyer will tell you companies were very slow to adopt this law, not least because some government agencies just didn’t recognize electronic contracts and signatures. Wet signatures remain king. When the pandemic hit, there was a campaign to push for the adoption of digital signatures. For a while, it worked, but after things died down, everyone went back to doing things the old way. So, we don’t know if these new EN Rules will go down the same road.
For it to truly take off, government must not only promote its use but be ready to accept it.
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1 This article is an expanded and slightly altered version of the one that was published for Permitly’s website: https://www.permitly.ph/post/understanding-new-e-notarization-rules-and-how-it-can-help-philippine-businesses.
2 Alice Grace Toop Notary Public, How English Notaries Are Different from US Notaries, Alice Grace Toop Notary Public, https://agt-notarypublic.co.uk/blog-1/f/how-english-notaries-are-different-from-us-notaries (last visited Aug. 25, 2026).
3 Emiliano Pasini, Notarial Practice and the History of Notaries | Saville & Co, (Feb. 14, 2022), https://savillenotaries.com/notarial-practice-and-the-history-of-notaries/.
4 Mathias Reimann, The Notary in American Legal History: The Fall and Rise of the Civil Law Tradition?, in Handbuch zur Geschichte des Notariats der europäischen Traditionen 559 (Mathias Schmoeckel & Werner Schubert eds., 2009), http://www.nomos-elibrary.de/index.php?doi=10.5771/9783845218625-559.
5 Id.
6 Rules on Electronic Notarization of 2025, A.M.-No.-24-10-14-SC.
7 Reimann, supra note 4.
8 2004 Rules on Notarial Practice of 2004, 02-08-13-SC-1.
9 Id.
10 Reimann, supra note 4.
11 Id.
12 Id.
13 Brown, James Cowie, The Origin and Early History of the Office of the Notary (1936).
14 Id.
15 Id.
16 G.R. No. L-8178, https://lawphil.net/judjuris/juri1960/oct1960/gr_l-8178_1960.html (last visited Aug. 25, 2026).
17 A.M. No. 12-8-8-SC, https://lawphil.net/courts/supreme/am/am_12-8-8-sc_2012.html (last visited Aug. 22, 2026).
18 Definition of AFFIDAVIT, (Aug. 24, 2026), https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/affidavit.
19 T. L. D. Staff, AFFIDAVIT, The Law Dictionary (Nov. 4, 2011), https://thelawdictionary.org/affidavit.
20 Signature Witnessing That Keeps Legal Documents Valid, The Hague Apostille (Feb. 23, 2026), https://thehagueapostille.co.uk/blogs/news/signature-witnessing-that-keeps-legal-documents-valid.
21 Burns, Kathryn, Notaries, Truth, and Consequences, 110 The American Historical Review 350 (2005).
22 Act No. 2711 | Official Gazette of the Republic of the Philippines, https://nlpdl.nlp.gov.ph/PH01/PhA001/1917/A2711.htm (last visited Aug. 25, 2026).
