Our will registry keeps your information confidential
We're launching the Canada Will Registry this Spring. We've designed it to keep your data confidential and we've obtained a legal opinion from a leading Canadian law firm confirming that estate practitioners have the implicit consent of their clients to register their wills.
How we maintain confidentiality
When you register the wills in your will vault on the Canada Will Registry, you are the only one who sees this data. This information is stored and backed up on secure servers in Canada. Everything is encrypted.
To search the Canada Will Registry, a firm or individual submits a Search Query on NoticeConnect. They will not see the results of the search. Instead, our system will automatically alert any law firms who registered a matching will. The law firm can then contact the searcher if it chooses.
PIPEDA and the LSO Rules
Because of our privacy policy and how we've designed the Canada Will Registry, lawyers have implicit consent from their clients to use this service. Our system is fully compliant with PIPEDA and the Law Society of Ontario's Rules of Professional Conduct.
You don't have to go and obtain written consent for every will in your vault to use our registry.
We have an official legal opinion from a leading Canadian law firm confirming this:
... NoticeConnect processes client information solely for the purposes of providing Services to Source Firms. As a result, Source Firms may, without obtaining client consent, upload client information into their instance of a will vault for the purposes of obtaining the Services. Under PIPEDA, this sharing of client information with NoticeConnect for the purposes of obtaining the Service is viewed as a transfer for processing, and not a disclosure, so no consent is required for the transfer. Under the LSO Rules, clients implicitly authorize their lawyers to share their information with service providers acting on the lawyer’s behalf ...
Contact us at [email protected] if you'd like to read full legal opinion.
The bottom line
A will registry needs registered wills to be useful. And law firms may not have contact information for all of the people whose wills are stored in their vaults. Obtaining written client consent to register these wills is impractical and a substantial administrative burden on firms.
The Canada Will Registry solves this problem by keeping your information confidential and alerting firms when someone is searching for will that you have.
