Notary

Some deeds exist in law only once passed before a notary; authentic form is a monopoly the law reserves for them. AI will not draw up the deed in their place: it will prepare everything that surrounds it, shifting the value of the profession toward the counsel a notary owes to every party at once.

The profession today

Notarial practice in Valais is a local practice: sole practices or small firms of a few notaries, spread across towns and boroughs, working in the canton's two languages for individuals, families, SMEs and public bodies. At the heart of the profession sits the authentic deed: the property sale, the inheritance agreement, the public will or the incorporation of a company acquire their force only once drawn up by a public officer whom the State has invested with that charge. This requirement of form protects the parties at the moments when they commit the most.

A practice's week covers a broad spectrum:

• Drawing up authentic deeds: property sales and gifts, inheritance agreements, public wills, company incorporations, marriage contracts
• Preparing deeds: drafts, clauses, back-and-forth with the parties and their advisers
• Verifications: land register, commercial register, civil status, identity and capacity of the parties
• Counsel: inheritance, business transfers, matrimonial regimes, property structuring
• Formalities and follow-up: land register applications, tax filings, registrations, correspondence with the authorities
• Practice life: staff, notarial candidates, billing

A significant share of the time sits between the deeds themselves: preparing, verifying, coordinating, following up. It is this intermediate layer that AI is starting to compress, within the five-to-ten-year horizon chapter 10 describes. The deed itself remains protected by law.

What AI is preparing

Preparing deeds. Drafts drawn up from the practice's templates and the case file, clauses adapted to the situation, successive versions kept current through the back-and-forth: what used to take hours of a clerk's time is now prepared in minutes. Proofreading changes in nature as a result. In a profession where the deed carries full evidentiary weight, a plausible error slipped into a draft — a wrongly paraphrased easement, a matrimonial regime assumed rather than verified — becomes a fault if it reaches the signature, and the notary's vigilance shifts from drafting to control.

Pre-briefed due diligence. Land register entries, easements and encumbrances, the history of a parcel, a company's standing in the commercial register: the tool gathers, cross-references, flags inconsistencies. Each element is then verified at the source, in the registers themselves; the summary guides the verification work without ever standing in for it.

Documented inheritance and transfers. Costed inheritance scenarios, draft agreements, consolidated inventories, simulation of reserved shares: for transfer files, the tool briefs in days what used to take weeks. Demand, meanwhile, is growing: the generation holding much of the property stock and family businesses is reaching the age of transfer, and one Valaisan in ten will be over 80 by 2035. Practices that absorb this wave with better-briefed files will keep time for the conversations these files demand.

Followed-up formalities. Prepared land register applications, pre-filled tax filings, tracking of registrations and deadlines: the administrative machinery that follows signature largely automates, under the practice's control, which remains accountable for every filing.

Parties' data: the prerequisite

The notary is bound by professional secrecy under Article 321 of the Criminal Code, and their practice concentrates what parties hold most sensitive: assets, wills, family situations, business plans. The nFADP, in force since 1 September 2023, adds to this secrecy without absorbing it. Three requirements before any deployment: tools operated under Swiss law or offering equivalent contractual guarantees (hosting, documented subcontracting, no reuse of data for training); a strict ban on feeding a draft deed or an inheritance inventory into a consumer-grade tool; traceability of what was generated, verified, and by whom. A will has no business sitting on a server whose jurisdiction is unknown.

What rises in judgment

Bearing witness in person. Drawing up the deed cannot be delegated to any tool: reading the deed aloud, verifying identity, assessing capacity to consent, the certainty that each party understands what they are signing and wants it freely. This moment, when the notary establishes consent, is exactly what authentic form protects. The federal framework on digitalising the notarial profession is evolving, without touching the core of this requirement: a public officer personally accountable for what they have witnessed.

Impartiality. The lawyer defends one party; the notary counsels them all. Rebalancing a draft that the balance of power has tilted to one side, making sure the elderly seller grasps the full extent of a right of habitation, that the spouse waiving their reserved share knows what they are waiving: this duty plays out beyond the text, in what the notary perceives of the people present. A formally balanced draft can conceal very real pressure. Detecting it remains their business.

Verification before drawing up. Checking every reference, every entry, every figure in a generated draft with the rigour of someone about to draw it up as a deed: a tool's hallucination becomes, if it goes unnoticed, the notary's fault, in a profession where the final document carries full evidentiary weight between the parties and toward third parties. This discipline of verification — what was checked, against which source, by whom — will be taught to notarial candidates even before drafting itself.

Guiding transfers. A business succession brings law, taxation and emotion to the same table: the founder hesitating to let go, the child taking over, heirs with unequal expectations. The tool costs out the scenarios; the notary steers the conversation that lets a family choose one without tearing itself apart. This guidance bills poorly by the hour and is often worth the whole file.

Cantonal practice. Notarial work in Valais is exercised within a cantonal framework: land register organisation, formal requirements, fee schedules, oversight. Knowing this practice, its customs and its contacts, in both languages, remains field knowledge that no model trained on generic federal law renders correctly.

Who keeps the final word?

Composite illustration. A notarial practice prepares the transfer of a craft business to the next generation. The tool consolidates the inventory, costs out three scenarios (a gift with charge, a sale at a favourable price, a family holding company) and prepares the draft deeds; the notary verifies each item against the registers and spots an old easement, apparently correctly cited, whose real scope changes the value of the operating building. The technical file is ready within days. What remains are four evenings of discussion with the family, where the essential is decided: finding the scenario the children who are not taking over can accept for good. The deed is drawn up two months later, signed by all. (Fictional, composite scenario; to be replaced with a real case during the embodiment pass.)

2030 job profile

The first new competency is verification before drawing up: checking a generated draft with the rigour of someone about to turn it into a deed, hunting the plausible error, documenting the chain of verification. The deed carries full evidentiary weight. This principle, which founds the profession, also becomes the measure of risk: anything that enters the deed without being verified at the source binds the public officer.

The second is transfer counsel on the scale of a generation: steering long inheritance processes, weaving together law, taxation and family dynamics, drawing on generated scenarios without handing them the conversation. The demographic wave makes this the decade's decisive skill.

The third is governing secrecy with tools: choosing and configuring the practice's tools with regard to Article 321 CC and the nFADP, documenting data flows, informing parties of what is processed and where. In a small practice, this responsibility has a name: the notary in charge.

Territorial anchoring

Local notarial practice is part of the canton's quiet infrastructure: it is before a notary that the smallest parcel sales pass, families' inheritances, the transfers of the SMEs that make up the valleys' economy. The coming decade concentrates an unusual volume of estate files there, driven by an ageing population. An equipped practice absorbs more files without sacrificing presence; an overwhelmed practice lets inheritances drag on, and inheritances that drag on damage families and freeze assets. The speed and quality with which the canton accompanies this wave will be decided partly within practices, partly within the registers and cantonal services whose own equipment conditions theirs.

What the decision-maker must do now

For a notary

Start with preparing deeds and due diligence, first setting a written verification rule: every generated element is checked at the source before entering a draft, and that check is traced. Choose tools compatible with Article 321 CC (hosting, contracts, no data reuse) and measure over a half-year the time regained, to decide what it funds: more files, or more time per family in transfers.

For the notaries' professional association

Issue guidelines on using generative tools in practices: compatibility with professional secrecy, verification of draft deeds, informing parties. Negotiate with the canton an equipped, secure access to the registers, on which the entire due-diligence chain depends. And bring the profession into the alpine campus (the cantonal training scheme proposed under action plan PA-I1), with practical transfer case studies built on fictional files.

For the State of Valais (land register and notarial oversight)

Announce the practice before the first disputes arise: what a deed prepared with generative tools will need to satisfy, how verification diligence will be assessed, which uses would amount to a breach of professional secrecy. Continue in parallel the digitalisation of the registers with interfaces practices can query securely: every hour saved at the counter is reinvested in handling the coming wave of inheritances.

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Jérôme Deshaie is the founder of MCVA Consulting SA, an agency specialising in the AI transformation of organisations in Valais, and the author of Bisse Cognitif.