Greg Lirette, founder of Notary Geek.

The interviews, profiles and records below explain Greg's background and the experience he brings to Notary Geek.

Greg's background combines notary work, military procedure, and enterprise technical escalation. He was a Texas notary in the early 2000s while living in Texas, became a Florida notary in 2022, and became a Florida online notary in 2023.

Greg's paid IT work began by 1995, including Packard Bell-era support and IT work while serving in the U.S. Army. As of 2026, that is more than 30 years of professional experience. He learned BASIC on a Commodore 64 in 1984, before his paid IT work began.

Greg joined Microsoft in 1997 and later moved into escalation engineering, continuing in that work through 2006. The work included Microsoft Windows Active Directory and Directory Services escalation involving Active Directory, Certificate Services, X.509 certificate infrastructure, debugging, and complex enterprise support cases. His broader technical background also includes Citrix, Dell, Perot Systems, and consulting work across virtualization, Windows, cloud, and customer environments.

Greg says he started thinking about human trust, deception, scams, identity and technical systems around 1983, when he was about ten.

In Microsoft escalation work, Greg learned to recognize security implications through live debugging and product-version comparisons. In many cases, a later product version already contained the correction. His work helped confirm the behavior and make the servicing and security case for applying the correction where customers were affected.

Greg also participated in internal Microsoft Windows Terminal Server working groups and engineering/support aliases before release. He created the internal TSTECH alias after Microsoft marketing asked that deep Terminal Services technical discussion move off a sales-focused alias, and he maintained it while at Microsoft. The alias later expanded when the Terminal Server development team was added. Under a formal Microsoft-Citrix relationship, Greg became the Microsoft-side point person for escalations that had to move officially between the two companies.

That experience matters because online notarization, digital certificates, identity proofing, audit trails, and apostille routing all depend on trust infrastructure and careful process. Notary Geek's work is built around checking the source, understanding the route, and avoiding unsupported workflows that make documents harder to rely on later.

Greg is involved in the Virginia biometrics issue because Notary Geek serves foreign-signer, no-SSN, apostille, USPS Form 1583, company-document, and downstream-routing customers who were being routed through platform answers that used Virginia as a workaround. His technical background made the vocabulary problem visible: a signer-side certificate or PIV-style identity route is not the same thing as ordinary commercial selfie/liveness or face-match identity screening.

Greg's Microsoft, Citrix, Active Directory, Certificate Services, X.509, identity, cloud and security-compliance experience is relevant to the trust infrastructure behind online notarization.

Greg has direct experience pushing back on incorrect document rejection and notary misconceptions, including contested situations where the record changed after he challenged the position. That background is part of why Notary Geek focuses so heavily on source-based accuracy, document defensibility, and getting the details right the first time.

If you want to see how Notary Geek handles common misconceptions, start with the law, the state notes, and the source-standard pages. They make the contrast clear between what the law actually says and what people often repeat without checking.