Jenny Bird
Jenny advises individuals, families, executors and trustees primarily based in the UK on a wide variety of UK tax, trust, succession and estate planning issues.
Jenny has broad experience in many aspects of the law that individuals encounter on a day-to-day basis including advising on and setting up trusts, administering estates, drafting wills and providing tax advice. She is part of our probate team and since qualifying as an associate in 2010, she has been involved with the administration of complex and high-value estates, including estates with cross-border elements and estates where offers in lieu of inheritance tax have been made.
Jenny qualified as a Notary Public in August 2015 and is able to provide notarial services to individuals and companies.
Jenny is a member of STEP (Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners) and the Notaries Society.
Qualified in England and Wales, 2010.
3 Contributions by Jenny Bird
PRACTICE NOTES
Notarial practice in England and Wales: principles, public/private forms, verification and certification for individuals, companies and ships, foreign-language documents, negotiable instruments, instructing notaries, costs and e-notarisation
The principles of the notarial act are that it is:
the notary’s own act, and expressly not that of the parties named in the document
an official record of a fact, event, or transaction
set out in documentary form, irrespective of the format adopted by the underlying document, fact, event, or transaction
The notarial act serves to provide authentication by means of documentary evidence that will be accepted in the receiving jurisdiction where it is intended to be used...
Private Client
PRACTICE NOTES
Notaries in England and Wales: history, regulation (Court of Faculties/Faculty Office), functions, qualifications and training, scrivener and ecclesiastical notaries, evidential status, and comparison with civil law notaries
The Notaries Society has produced a helpful leaflet which sets out a short history and explains the work of the notaries profession, and which is available in English and in several foreign languages.
History
Of the three branches of the legal profession in England and Wales, the notaries profession is the most ancient, its roots lying in the civil institutions of classical Rome.
Little is recorded in England and Wales before 1279, when Pope Nicholas III granted the Archbishop of Canterbury the faculty to appoint three notaries in any one year.
During the reformation, the Ecclesiastical Licences Act 1533 (ELA 1533) transferred to the Archbishop of Canterbury the authority to grant faculties to notaries.
Statutory recognition first came with the Public Notaries Act 1801 (PNA 1801), followed by the Public Notaries Act 1843 (PNA 1843), the Courts and Legal Services Act 1990 and, latterly, the Legal Services Act 2007 (LSA 2007)...
Private Client
PRACTICE NOTES
UK notarial and public document legalisation: FCDO Apostille, consular legalisation and e-Apostille
Legalisation
Most papers that a notary public or a scrivener notary attest are intended to have effect in a country or jurisdiction outside England and Wales. Legalisation is the method by which one state, eg England and Wales, confirms to another state, ie the receiving jurisdiction, that the signature and seal of a public official, such as a notary, are genuine, following checks against its register. As the receiving jurisdiction has no independent means of knowing whether the notary’s seal and signature are authentic, the notary’s signature and seal may need to be legalised by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) and, on occasion, a foreign Embassy, Consulate or High Commission, to evidence the notary’s status. The process is complex and varies with the receiving jurisdiction’s requirements, so specialist advice should always be sought.
Legalisation by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office
Many states are signatories to the Hague Convention of 5th October 1961 (Abolishing the Requirement of Legalisation for Foreign Public Documents) (the Hague Convention 1961), meaning a document may require only an Apostille from the Legalisation Office of the FCDO, based in Milton Keynes and London...
Private Client
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