BC legal professionals move to e-filing.

The legal profession in British Columbia is making the move to electronic document filing and exchange with the help of Juricert's system of digital credentials and electronic signature and form creation capabilities in Adobe[R] Acrobat[R] 5.0 software.

Juricert is an incorporated company established by the Law Society of British Columbia as a project of the Federation of Canadian Law Societies. It is dedicated to reducing the risk, improving the certainty, and enhancing the trust and authenticity of professional legal dealings over the Internet. This includes government e-filings, document transfers, business communications and financial transactions between professionals, their clients and third parties. It is also committed to establishing and maintaining a secure national registry of Trusted Digital Credentials in partnership with public regulatory bodies, secure service providers, lawyers, and notaries.

Recognizing the need to develop a secure, unalterable electronic format for the legal profession, Juricert has developed a secure identification and registration system that enables lawyers to send legal documents electronically with binding signatures, confidential transmission, proof of delivery, and assurance on content integrity. These electronic credentials help validate documents based on a database of regulatory bodies, lawyers, and notaries.

Juricert issues digital certificates built with the digital signature feature in Acrobat 5.0. This enables lawyers to digitally sign their documents in a way that can be validated against a database of digital credentials developed in conjunction with the BC Law Society and other regulatory bodies. "We chose Acrobat 5.0 because documents in the Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) are as good as paper," says Peter Baran, CEO of Juricert.

In the document creation stage, Adobe PDF enables lawyers to develop documents in clear, editable text. These documents can be digitally signed, password protected, and accessed using the free Adobe Acrobat Reader software. Juricert enables identity information contained in Adobe PDF documents e-signed with a Juricert-issued certificate to be securely checked on-line against the Juricert identity registry. Agencies and other parties relying on these Adobe PDF documents can now validate the signing lawyer's professional status and identity with Juricert.

Juricert is currently working with BC lawyers and other provincial legal associations to attempt to make PDF the standard for legal documents across Canada.