Protocol of opening and announcing the will

The „protocol of opening and announcing a will” may constitute a notarial deed, which is a result of an independent, separate act performed at the notary’s office, or it may be a part that initiates notarial inheritance proceedings preceding the „Declaration of acceptance of inheritance”. In order for a notary to open and announce a will to those interested in doing so, he must first be presented with proof of the testator’s death, which is undoubtedly a copy of the death certificate. Pursuant to Art. 646 of the Code of Civil Procedure, a person who has a will, when it learns about the death of the testator, is obliged to submit it to the inheritance court or to a notary public. Therefore, the necessary documents to be presented to the notary public are the will and the death certificate (or for the record as a stand-alone act, it is possible to present a legally valid decision on declaring the person dead or confirming death). According to Art. 649 §2 of the Code of Civil Procedure „The interested persons are not informed about the date of opening and announcement, however, they may be present at this activity”, while at the same time, pursuant to Art. 652 of the Code of Civil Procedure, the notary notaries shall, if possible, notify the persons affected by the testamentary dispositions as well as the executor, the temporary representative and the curator of the estate about the opening and announcement of a will. In addition, the notary is required to immediately notify the inheritance court of the transaction by sending a copy of the prepared report. The very symbolic opening of a will is a technical act. The most important is the content of the protocol, which should contain not only the basics, i.e. a description of the external condition of the will and the date of the will, but most of all the „interior of the will”, i.e. the most important testamentary dispositions. A notary may open the announcement of ordinary wills, i.e. handwritten, notarized and allographic, as well as special wills, i.e. oral, travel and military wills, but the specific ones must be previously confirmed in writing so that they can be opened and announced by a notary public. If several wills of the same testator were submitted, all wills are opened and announced, and on each of them an appropriate mention is made of the others (Art. 650 of the Civil Code). Pursuant to the Ordinance of the Minister of Justice on the maximum rates of the notary’s fee for the preparation of the opening protocol and the announcement of a will, the maximum rate is PLN 50. It should be remembered that this is a net price, so 23% VAT should be added to it, which is a total gross amount of PLN 61.50. The original of the notarial deed always stays in the notary’s office, so the client downloads an extract – the cost always depends on the number of pages – for one page it is (gross) PLN 7.38. As a rule, the said protocol is no more than a few pages long.