In October 2024, the law called The "Law to establish email as a means of notification for commercial entities" was approved in Costa Rica, which, in summary, obliges companies to permanently maintain an email address for judicial and administrative notices.
This law required the Costa Rican Public Registry to establish a process for entities to register this email; to this effect, the Public Registry issued, in June 2025, the Guideline DPJ-zero zero two-two thousand twenty-five of the Directorate of the Registry of Legal Entities.
In accordance with this guideline, the e-mail for notices must now be registered in the National Registry. The procedure is carried out by granting a public deed in which the legal representative of the company must appear, or by notarizing a shareholders' meeting in which the agreement to indicate this email address is taken. The procedure is exempt from registration fees (as long as that is the only act to be carried out).
The deadline to make this email registration is one year from June 4, 2025; after this date, the National Registry will not register documents of companies that have not carried out the procedure.
Likewise, any new company that is incorporated must include, in the incorporation public deed, the respective email for notifications.
When choosing the email address to use for these purposes, it is important to use an address that is a general address of the company, not of a specific person and it is advisable that this address is redirected to several people. This, in order to avoid the process of changing addresses in the Public Registry every time a person leaves the organization and that not only one person is in charge of reviewing this account, since the deadlines for responding any notice will begin on the date that the email is sent, regardless of whether the person who receives it was on vacation, on sick leave or simply did not see the e-mail on time. In addition, the organization must implement an internal procedure on how to react in the event of receiving a notification through this email, reminding the people in charge of the confidentiality duties that this type of notice implies.
In addition to this, it should be considered that it is possible that these addresses will become a form of general marketing, so those who receive these emails must have the ability to differentiate those spam emails and the important ones and who to inform in case a notification arrives.
By Carla Baltodano Estrada
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