Imagine the late Stephen Hawking had been your client and wanted you to notarize a power of attorney for him.

Hawking was a brilliant theoretical physicist renown in the scientific community for his work on black holes. He gained wide public celebrity status as the author of A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes. The difficult is that Hawking suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), commonly called Lou Gehrig’s disease. As a result Hawking lost the use of his hands and was unable to sign his name. He also lost his ability to speak but was able to communicate via a computerized voice synthesizer. Throughout his illness he retained great mental acuity.