Notaries and artificial intelligence, between public office and management software

In Italy there are about 5,000 notai (civil-law notaries, who in Italy are public officials) in practice: 5,033 in the latest figure from the Consiglio nazionale del notariato (the national council of notaries), out of 5,971 seats set by the ministry's table. In 2024 they received 3.7 million deeds subject to registration, about 740 per notary; in 2025 99.4% of public deeds were registered electronically. It is a profession that is already entirely digital, with a network of its own: the Rete Unitaria del Notariato, run by Notartel, the company of the National Council and the Cassa (the notaries' pension fund).

What the notary cannot entrust to anyone

The notarial law defines notaries as "public officials" who receive deeds, give them public faith and keep them on deposit. Article 47 provides that the notary "investigates the will of the parties and, under their own direction and responsibility, sees to the complete drawing up of the deed".

The principles of professional ethics, in force since January 2025, are even more precise. In Article 41 they reserve to the notary, and to the notary alone, the identification of the parties, the investigation of their will, the direction of the drawing up of the deed "also when drawn up in digital form", the reading and explanation, and the custody of the signing device. Article 42 forbids outsourcing the formalities that follow the deed, "also in order to guarantee respect for the principles of personal performance and confidentiality". Article 43 imposes professional secrecy on who turns to the notary, on the content of the service and on everything the notary learns, and extends it to employees, collaborators and trainees.

The code does not mention artificial intelligence. But it already draws the boundary: a model can help with preparatory work, it cannot investigate the will of the parties or decide the text of the deed.

To this are added Law 132 of 2025, which since 10 October 2025 limits artificial intelligence to instrumental and support activities and obliges the professional to inform the client of the systems used, and the anti-money-laundering rules. Notaries are obliged parties, keep data and documents on the parties and beneficial owners for ten years, and send more than 96% of the suspicious transaction reports that come from the professions.

What the notariat has said

The president of the National Council, Vito Pace, wrote in September 2025 that artificial intelligence "is certainly a great resource" but "cannot replace the public function of the notary", and at the October congress he welcomed Law 132 because it "establishes as an unbreachable limit the supremacy of man over machine".

The National Council's commission for information technology and artificial intelligence has approved a "Quadro prospettico sull'uso dell'intelligenza artificiale nell'attività notarile" (a prospective framework on the use of artificial intelligence in notarial work), which is to be supplemented by specific ethical principles, entrusted to another commission. The text is not public. In December 2025 the vice-president of Notartel wrote that companies developing artificial intelligence systems must not be allowed to use clients' confidential data, and recommended programs with open and validated algorithms, supervision by the notary, staff training and clear information to clients. It is a contribution in a trade journal, not a rule.

An artificial intelligence tool from the notariat itself, or an agreement between the National Council and a provider, does not for now appear to exist.

What the management software offers

In the meantime the management software has arrived. Wolters Kluwer launched NotaioNext Expert AI in April 2026: drafts of deeds and clauses, extraction of data from land registry searches, identity documents, titles and articles of association, comparison between the data in the deed, the file, the company register and the land registry, search of the firm's archive. It states that it works "in a protected, secure environment fully compliant with the GDPR"; where it runs and with which model is not stated. Zucchetti offers the Novia platform, which composes the deed starting from a previous one and the data in the file, checks the risks of nullity and the validity of the rules cited, and extracts data for the subsequent formalities. It is a web platform that uses external models, with a commitment not to use the notary's data to train them. The artificial intelligence module of Arianna, also from Zucchetti, requires the firm to open its own account with OpenAI. None of the three publishes prices.

One detail is worth noting: the same Zucchetti management systems can still be installed "on the firm's servers, to always keep the data at home". The management system can sit in the firm; its artificial intelligence, today, cannot.

When an on-premises system makes sense

The work that the management software promises to automate, that is reading land registry searches and documents, extracting data, comparing, searching the archive, preparing a draft from a previous deed, is precisely the work that a mid-sized open model can do on a machine in the firm. The source documents belong to the firm, the deed templates too, and the result is always a draft that the notary directs and rereads.

An on-premises system makes sense above all in three cases:

• When the parties' documents are not to leave. Identity cards, land registry searches, articles of association, estates, wills: for a public official who must keep deeds "in a safe place" and cannot outsource the formalities, it is the choice most consistent with the rules that already bind them.
• When the firm's archive is the main resource. Years of the firm's own deeds are the best basis for finding precedents and clauses; indexing them on the premises does not require sending them to anyone.
• When someone looks after it. A machine with a model has to be updated, protected and monitored. In a notarial firm a provider is needed to do this, with a contract governing its confidentiality.

It costs more than a cloud subscription, and open models still lag behind the best ones for reasoning on new legal questions. For a notarial firm, however, the cost of an adequate machine is small compared with the value of the deeds it handles, and the question to ask is not how much it costs, but where the parties' documents must be kept.

While waiting for the notariat's ethical principles on artificial intelligence, the rules already in force are enough to find one's bearings: the notary directs, checks and answers for the work; the client must be informed; and the parties' data, as far as possible, stay where the notary keeps them.

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Main sources: Law of 16 February 1913, no. 89, Arts. 1, 47, 61; Consiglio nazionale del notariato, Principi di deontologia professionale dei notai, Arts. 41–43; Dati Statistici Notarili 2024; Agenzia delle Entrate, Bilancio 2025; Legislative Decree 231/2007, Arts. 31 and 34-bis; Law of 23 September 2025, no. 132, Art. 13; Infonews Notartel, September 2025, December 2025, June 2026; Wolters Kluwer press releases (13 April 2026) and Zucchetti Software Giuridico product pages.