Transcript of the above video: 

I made another video contemporaneously with this one where I talked about a similar, it's in the same vein as this video, it is basically the question of "why won't you witness this prenup I brought in? Why won't you witness it, even though you didn't draft it?" So what are we talking about here?

From time to time, and this has happened to me a couple of times in roughly the past month and a half, so I thought I'd go ahead and do some videos on it. People have come in to do consults and other things with us and they have brought in documents. In one case it was a Will and another case it was a contract; it was a rather long contract. I hadn't actually seen a prenup per se but I figured I would do a video on this. But basically, they brought in documentation that I don't know where it has come from. They have either drafted it, they have had AI draft it, they have had somebody else draft it, but they want us to witness the thing. And I'm not necessarily talking about notarization; just act as a witness to somebody’s signature even though we didn't draft the document. 

Now I know there are probably going to be trolls in the comments that are going to say, "oh he just don't want to do it because he didn't draft it, he didn't get paid to do that work". Well there is an element of that. I'm not making these videos - with no monetization - because I am not promoting our firm. Yeah, we are in a business here, a law firm business.

But that said, that's not really to the point of it. The point is, if we didn't have anything to do with the drafting, we don't know the context or the content of the document and that's a big deal because again now you can get into the fine points of notarization versus witnessing, versus common law implications of notarization, versus witnessing of a signature, versus Civil Law ramifications of witnessing a signature in a notary context versus a non-notary context, there are differences. For example in Common Law - for example notarization - when you notarize something in the Common Law system, you're just saying hey this person signed it. But in a Civil Law context it could go deeper. It could be, yeah, to my knowledge, this person understood what they were signing and things; again that will be driven by underlying facts.

But the point I'm trying to make is for example pre-nups are very complex instruments and they pertain to an ongoing legal relationship between two parties that can have serious ramifications, especially in a courtroom context down the road. If we were to witness something that we didn't draft with regard to a prenup for example, that can be very problematic for us because again, if we didn't draft it, we don't know the content and we don't know even the context. Was the person who's signing it - they may have looked fine to us but were they under duress? Or what is the timing of when the prenup was signed, versus when the marriage occurred? Those kinds of things are definitely things you have to keep in mind with regard to prenuptial agreements, and this is the reason, at the end of the day, when folks show up and say, "hey why don't you just sign this prenup that I had drafted up?" and they get kind of annoyed with me I guess or whatever, miffed or something, that we won't do it. Well there is a reason, and it is because at the end of the day, we could be dragged into some proceeding in an unforeseen way, on a document that we didn't have anything to do with drafting and therefore we don't know the context or the content of it and that can be bad for us, it can be bad for the person, the people that are involved in the agreement. It’s just all around generally speaking we are only here at our firm, we are only going to be witnessing documentation that we are a party to the drafting of.