Tom Bedford, partner at DAC Beachcroft, says it’s crucial that firms also consider the risk in remote client communication

Most lawyers love paper. Large files and documents have traditionally filled our filing cabinets and huge hangars of storage facilities up and down the country.

In recent years, most law firms have embraced paperless working as far as possible, made easier by changes to the law which have meant that deeds and discharges can be executed electronically, and court documents can be submitted by email or electronic filing systems.

The consequences of the pandemic are wide-ranging for practitioners. Many are negative, but one positive is that it has forced us to adopt a more modern way of working for certain procedures that have traditionally required paper.

Take, for example, the way in which wills are signed and witnessed. The process of signing and witnessing wills in person has been in existence for 183 years. New rules, which have been hurried through Parliament, and which will be backdated to 31 January 2020, now allow signatures to be witnessed using one of the video platforms with which we have all become familiar.

This change is said to be temporary, with matters reverting to the old system in 2022. Whether that remains the case will depend, we suspect, on how the new system works.

The Land Registry also updated its guidance on 27 July 2020. It will now accept e-signed deeds and documents. This is subject to a number of conditions. All parties must agree, the parties must be represented by conveyancers and the conveyancers must have control of the signing process.

Identifying options
One of the other problems caused by the pandemic, however, is the difficulty for solicitors, for whom it is crucial to verify a client’s identity. An advisory note produced by the legal sector affinity group confirms that a firm can still onboard a client, even though they cannot complete identification and verification procedures in person. They advise that firms can take all, or a combination, of the following steps:

• Using digital identity and verification services which meet the requirements of the money laundering regulations, namely services that are secure from fraud and misuse and capable of providing an appropriate level of assurance that the client is who they say they are.
• Obtaining and analysing additional data to verify information provided by the client, including geolocation, IP addresses and verifiable phone numbers.
• Sending secure codes to the client’s telephone numbers, email addresses or physical addresses to validate access to accounts.
• Perhaps most popular of all, using live videoconferencing to enable clients to show their faces and original photo documents to enable the solicitor to compare them to a scanned copy of the same document.

Continue reading ‘Problems with solutions’ in Briefing November/December 2020 – Alert to change, here.