It’s a simple thing. Blue ink versus black ink has become an issue when it comes to signing important documents of all kinds. Black ink, as it fades over time, tends to mimic documents as they’re photocopied. This is bad enough in many instances, but a particularly dangerous time to sign a document in black ink is when estate planning documents are being finalized. The best remedy for â€black ink†blending is to always sign estate planning documents in blue ink. If signing is performed in blue, original estate planning documents can be easily distinguished from their inevitably ensuing generations of photocopies. Judicious estate planning attorneys will require â€signing in blue†as a matter of course. A situation involving such an attorney may prove instructive. Recently this attorney was hired to perform Medi-Cal planning for a client’s mother. The mother had prepared her own estate planning documents perhaps a decade previously with a different attorney who didn’t insist on the â€blue ink†rule. Instead, the mother had signed her original documents in black ink. Copies were made as needed for banks and other custodians. Over the years, the mother and her son had â€lost†the original, as it had become indistinguishable from other copies. The mother and son had become painfully aware of this predicament when an original document was required for record keeping purposes by the county recorder. The attorney’s client (the son) had retraced his interactions with several banks, but the original estate planning documents could not be verified. Although not lost in a literal sense, the documents were for all practical considerations, missing. This sad state of affairs presented a problem, as the county recorder accepted only originals of recordable documents. Fortunately, the original drafting attorney was still available (a decade later), and only because she was willing to prepare a certification that the copy was identical to the original, was the problem able to be rectified. Had the original attorney been unavailable, or even worse, deceased or incapacitated for any reason, the necessary recordation of the Durable Power of Attorney for the mother to permit her son, acting as her agent, to transfer real estate in connection with planning, would have proved impossible. To reiterate, unless there is a specific reason to do otherwise, blue ink should always be used to sign estate planning documents.
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