THIS RESOURCE IS NO LONGER MAINTAINED. As first published in 2016, this resource was developed from a series of suggested protocols originally drafted by the Walrus Committee, a committee of senior practitioners from several major Australian law firms, to assist lawyers in validly arranging the remote or virtual signings of deeds, real property documents, PPSA security agreements and other documents, and to provide the then-current legal reasoning informing those protocols.

The necessity for the remote signing protocols in their original form has been in part superseded by the commencement of a range of major statutory reforms at the Commonwealth, State and Territory levels over the course of 2020-2022 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which significantly modified the legal requirements in respect of, and prescribed specific procedures for, electronic execution and remote witnessing of those and other documents in each jurisdiction. Accordingly, this resource has been unpublished to avoid confusion.