Two questions come up on nearly every intake call: whether you have to be there, and whether any notary can handle it. Here are the honest answers, and what they tell you about how a document project actually runs.
Do You Have to Be Present?
Only if your document has to be notarized before it can be apostilled. Some documents do and some don’t. A notarization needs the person signing to be in front of a notary. If your document doesn’t need one, you don’t need to be there.
State apostilles. Some documents have to be notarized before they can be apostilled, and a notarization does need the person signing to be in front of a notary. That is the only part that needs you. The document itself can come from anywhere. A client outside the country can order their Arizona birth certificate, mail it to us, and we process the Arizona apostille and mail it back. We never meet.
Federal apostilles. An FBI background check has to exist before it can be apostilled, and obtaining one is a separate service — Anshin Mobile Notary & LiveScan handles that piece. How the fingerprints are taken decides whether you need to appear: electronic submission is the easier route and does require you in person, and where that is not practical, ink fingerprint cards can be mailed in instead. Once the check exists, the federal apostille does not need you at all.
What We Do That a Notary Public Does Not
A notary public witnesses a signature. That is a real job, and it is one step.
We do the whole thing — the notarization where one is needed, the apostille, and getting the finished document back to you.
Notaries public do not obtain apostilles. They do not tell you whether you need an apostille, a notarization, or both. And they do not work out the pathway — which authority handles your document, in which state, in what order. That last part is most of the job, and it is where things go wrong.
Where It Usually Goes Wrong
When a document reaches us already notarized, the same handful of problems come up. The notarial certificate uses the wrong wording. The dates do not work. A signer’s name is misspelled. Or, most often, the notary who signed is not commissioned in the state you are asking for the apostille from.
A document going to the California Secretary of State has to be notarized by a California notary. The same rule holds in Arizona, and everywhere else. People get something notarized in one state and try to apostille it in another, and it comes straight back. More on what gets refused.
Working From Outside the United States
We do this constantly. Recently a client in Greece needed an apostille on a marriage certificate. The certificate had been issued in another county in California — though it could have been any county, or any state, which is the point.
They got the certificate to us. We obtained the apostille and sent it back, on a rush, because they were getting married and applying for visas and those dates were not moving.
That is the shape of most overseas work: you are in one place, the document was issued in another, and the deadline does not care. How it works when you live abroad.
Start Here
Before anything moves, send us a picture of the document.
Front and back, every page — front and back of each one, wherever there is anything on the reverse.
We check it before anything is submitted, because the question that decides everything is whether the document can actually get the apostille you need. Sometimes it cannot. There are a great many ways a request can fail, and nearly all of them are visible in advance, on the document itself. What disqualifies a document.
Send the photograph to (213) 340-4041 and we will tell you what you are dealing with.