The Cost of Convenience

The Cost of Convenience: What We Lose When We Push Everyone Toward Remote Online Notary

Every few weeks, someone tells me the same thing: "You should really get into RON."

I get why they say it. Remote online notary is fast. It's scalable. You can notarize a document for someone in another state without leaving your kitchen table. On paper, it looks like the obvious evolution of this business.

But I've been doing this in person for almost six years and nearly 5,000 signings, and I keep coming back to the same question: fast for whom, and at what cost?

## We've Already Automated Away Enough

Think about how much of daily life has already been stripped of human contact. We bank from an app. We order food through a screen and pick it up without a word to anyone. We pull through a drive-through window and never see a face beyond a gloved hand passing out a bag. Each of these felt like a small, reasonable convenience at the time. Stacked together, they add up to a life where you can go days without a real conversation with someone outside your own house.

COVID accelerated all of this, and we're still living with the aftermath. People stayed behind closed doors because they had to, and a lot of us saw firsthand what that isolation did to neighborhoods, to older adults, to anyone whose main social contact used to be a errand run or a face-to-face transaction. Remote online notary asks us to take one more human interaction — a moment where two people sit across a table, look at each other, and handle something important together — and move it permanently behind a screen. We're not required to do that anymore. We're choosing to.

## What Actually Happens at the Signing Table

A signing isn't just a stamp and a signature. It's often one of the biggest financial transactions of someone's life — buying a home, refinancing, settling an estate. People are nervous. They have questions they're embarrassed to ask over a chat box. They want to know that the person sitting across from them actually looked at the document, actually confirmed their identity in person, actually cared whether they understood what they were signing.

I've sat with people at their kitchen tables while they cried over a divorce settlement. I've talked a first-time homebuyer through their nerves before they signed. I've noticed something wasn't right with a document and caught it because I was physically present and paying attention, not because I was scanning a screen split three ways. None of that happens through a webcam appointment squeezed between someone's other browser tabs.

## RON Optimizes for the Wrong Thing

The push toward RON treats notarization like a bottleneck to eliminate — friction to remove so the transaction can close faster. But some of that "friction" is the actual point. Verifying identity, confirming someone is signing willingly and with a clear mind, making sure they understand the stakes of what they're putting their name on — that's not red tape. That's the entire purpose of having a notary in the first place. Speed it up too much and you start trading away the safeguard for the sake of the paperwork moving faster.

There's also a real vulnerability angle that gets glossed over. Remote sessions are easier to spoof, easier to pressure someone through off-camera, and harder to catch subtle signs of coercion or confusion that are obvious in person. A screen can be tampered with in ways a kitchen table can't.

## The Personal Cost Nobody Talks About

There's also what RON asks of the notary. To do it right, you need a dedicated, soundproofed space, a household that stays quiet on command for however many hours a day you're taking appointments, and a willingness to trade a job built on being out in your community for one spent alone in a room staring at a webcam. That's a real lifestyle shift, and it's one a lot of people pushing RON don't mention because they're not the ones living it.

I didn't get into mobile notary work to disappear behind a closed door. I got into it because I like being out in the community, meeting people where they are, and being a steady, trustworthy presence in transactions that matter to them. That's not something RON replicates — it's something RON replaces.

## Convenience Isn't Free

I'm not arguing RON should never exist. There are legitimate cases — someone out of state, someone with mobility limitations, a genuine time-zone problem — where remote makes sense. But the industry-wide push to make RON the default, the assumption that every mobile notary should be racing to convert, treats convenience as if it has no downside. It does. We're already living with the social cost of a hundred small conveniences that each seemed harmless on their own. Notarization doesn't need to be the next one.

Some things are worth doing the slower way, in person, with an actual human sitting across the table. This is one of them.