Transcript of the above video: 

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing Wills and we're discussing witnessing Wills that we haven't drafted.

This comes up every once in a while. I will have somebody, oftentimes they come in on a consult for something else, oftentimes it's like US Immigration or tax or something, and they will either, I think they have either drafted their own will or they have gone online and had some AI do a Will or something. First of all not a great idea, because you really do want somebody who's cognizant; AI to my mind is just a misnomer, it's data collation. It’s not really a thinking machine; it's not intelligent. It just can collate and compute very quickly. That's very different than making findings of fact, conclusions of law, interpreting the law etc., it's two different things.

But we get this from time to time. People will come in on something else, and they'll want us to witness something they have drafted or I don't know, they've gone to somebody else and I don't know why they didn't have those people assist them with those formalities, but people get kind of angry with me when I say, "yeah, we are not going to witness that", the signature of it even, even though we may just be witnessing a signature because I don't know what's in the thing. And frankly, if we didn't draft it, unless you're going to pay me to review it, I don't really want to review it because it's not something we did. I'm not trying to sound sort of impertinent or imperious or something, but at the end of the day one, it is our business to draft Wills, we do that, but also we don't know what's in the thing. And even witnessing a document can put you in the position where down the road, you may be called in to a Court Proceeding related to that document where you merely acted as a witness.

Again acting as a witness of a signature in a Common Law jurisdiction, for example notarization has different connotations for example in a Common Law jurisdiction versus a Civil Law jurisdiction. I am not going to really do a deep dive into that in this video, but it does. Witnessing - even without notarization - witnessing can too. Now these can be very semantic small nuanced points of difference between one, Common Law jurisdiction how witnesses may be pulled into a possible proceeding versus Civil Law, but at the end of the day, one of the reasons we don't witness things we haven't drafted is we don't know what's in it, and we don't know the background; we don't know whether or not the person who is signing it is under duress, we weren't part of that process. 

So it's not me trying to be difficult or obtuse when I tell people, "hey we're not going to witness that document, we didn't have anything to do with the drafting or the promulgation of it", it's because we don't know the context and we don't know the content, and frankly it can put us into a negative situation and really it's not really a good way of formalizing documentation and legal instruments such as a Will here in the Kingdom of Thailand.