What is a Professional Opinion Letter?
Though potentially difficult to obtain, POLs are invaluable during SSL validation
A Professional Opinion Letter, sometimes called a Legal Opinion Letter, is a document that authoritatively declares your company or organization is a legitimate legal entity. An accredited attorney or accountant must sign and notarize the form, which is supplied by the Certificate Authority. Professional Opinion Letters can sometimes be difficult to obtain, but they are invaluable during Organization- and Extended Validation SSL certificates due to the fact they can satisfy the majority of the requirements at once.
If your company has an in-house legal department or accountants, or if you've got one you work with, this is a great option to prepare and submit at the beginning of the validation process for both OV and EV SSL. (Scroll down to the bottom of this page to download the sample professional opinion letter.)
Professional Opinion Letters can satisfy the following requirements for EV or OV SSL certificates:
- Organization Authentication
- Operational Existence
- Physical Address
- Telephone Verification
- Domain Authentication
You can also use a Professional Opinion Letter to satisfy four of the five requirements for an Organization Validation code signing certificate.
We recommend obtaining a Professional Opinion Letter if it's possible. Again, they can be difficult to obtain, but their benefits are undeniable. Using a Professional Opinion Letter can expedite the Extended Validation and Organization Validation processes-sometimes you can get validated in just a few hours with a Professional Opinion Letter.
Keep in mind, the information contained the Professional Opinion Letter needs to be 100% accurate and up to date. Any mistakes will cause delays in issuance of your SSL certificate and could even affect the accreditation of the professional that signed it. The CPA/Attorney needs to be registered with the applicable board/authority for their location and Comodo needs to be able to locate their phone number to do a verification check.
You can download Comodo's Professional Opinion Letter form right here:
Download Sample Professional Opinion Letter
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