CORRECTED
Legal And Notary Services To Cost More
The cost of using the services of a lawyer
or notary will soon be more expensive, as
the Ministerio de Justicia is getting ready
to publish new rates that will be applied to
all legal services in the country.
Once the notice is published in La Gaceta,
registering a property, basic notary
services and hiring a lawyer for a criminal
case will be more expensive, in some cases
more than doubling that of the current fee.
For example, the current cost of a notary is
¢25.000 colones. That cost will double soon.
The base cost of hiring a lawyer in a
criminal proceeding will jump from the
current ¢200.000 to ¢600.000 colones.
Gilberto Corella, president of the Colegio
de Abogados (bar) explained that it is
necessary to adjust legal fees that has been
stagnant since 1999, when the question of
legal fees became a controversy, when the
Ministerio de Justicia removed established
limits, allowing lawyers to set their own
fees, but overturned by the Sala IV or
Constitutional Court.
The Comisión para Promover la Competencia
(the Commission to Promote Competition)
opposes to a table of minimum fees, claiming
that it goes against the rifhts of consumers
and a violation of freedom of competition.
Victoria Velásquez, director of the Comisión
considers that the set fees allows the group
to act as a monopoly.
However, Roy Jiménez, national director of
the notaries, sees the fees table as a way
of guaranteeing the public services. Jiménez
is in charge of supervising notaries and
considers it suspicious when one notary
charges considerably less than others, like
the case of one notary who operates out of a
van near the immigration office.
Notaries (notary public) is a public officer
constituted by law to serve the public in
non-contentious matters usually concerned
with estates, deeds, powers-of-attorney, and
foreign and international business. A
notary's main functions are to administer
oaths and affirmations, take affidavits and
statutory declarations, witness and
authenticate the execution of certain
classes of documents,
In Costa Rica,
all Notaries are
Lawyers, but not all Lawyers are Notaries. |
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
