Within the judicial procedures there is the expert handwriting test . Its purpose is to identify the authorship of the graphics. An expert in the field, called a handwriting expert , through a series of techniques, will be responsible for identifying the authorship of handwritten texts and signatures .
Private document : the expert will carry out a handwriting comparison when the authenticity of said document is questioned. The denial may refer to the entire document, to female database a part of it or only to the signature that appears on it.
Public document : when the authenticity of any public document that lacks a matrix or reliable copies is denied, provided that said document cannot be recognized by the official who issued it (for example, due to death, transfer, retirement and his/her whereabouts are unknown).
But be careful because the verification of public documents does not imply the intervention of an expert . The verification of public documents with their originals will be carried out by the Clerk of the Court of Justice (Court Clerk).
On the contrary, in the comparison of letters what is challenged is the authority , complete or partial, of the document provided by the counterparty and this is where the calligraphic expertise and the calligraphy expert come into play.
What does a handwriting expert do?
These are professionals with degrees in Librarianship and Archivist, or Graduates in Philology, all of them with specific knowledge of handwriting. There are many Associations that send their lists of expert graphologists to the Courts or to the Common Services for the Appointment of Experts.
The skills of calligraphy experts include, among others:
Compare documents
Expert handwriting reports: analysis of contracts, receipts, bills of exchange, letters, holographic wills, etc.
Identification of alterations in any type of document to determine its possible fraudulent origin.
Identification and analysis of erasures, graffiti and superimpositions on documents.
Identification of forgeries in any handwritten or even printed document.
Identification of authorship
Verification of signature and authorship in holographic wills .
It is important to distinguish between the graphologist and the calligrapher. The former uses a set of theoretical hypotheses that indicate that through the study of handwriting, the personality characteristics of an individual can be defined , and the calligrapher determines the identity of the person writing from the point of view of authorship , without determining any personality characteristics of the subject in question.