Introducing and Working With Electronic Signatures in Mass Applications: Notaries and the German Commercial Register

It is not a simple task to enable more than 8,600 legal professionals, their offices and staff and more than 500 courts, judges and clerks to move from a paper-based procedure to an electronic one on a fixed date. It gets worse if you realize that now more than 800,000 transactions each year will require a considerably higher standard of reliability, security and privacy than what is offered in current internet standards. The odds begin to look insurmountable when 17 federal and regional governments are added to the mix and spice it up with a deadline that seems tight even for a less complicated project.

This is the basic situation that German notaries and courts were faced with when federal and regional governments decided to introduce compulsory electronic filings to the German commercial register (Handelsregister) from January 1st, 2007. The decision was in part based on the requirements of EU directive 2003/58...

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