Thanks to Bryan Sims of The Connected Lawyer, I came across (1) this useful post by TechnoEsq on the different ways of signing legal documents electronically and (2) this post by Ernie Svenson, wearing his PDF for Lawyers hat, on one of those ways of signing, namely using digital signatures.
By way of a reminder, digital signatures form part of Echosign and other signature-automation solutions.
I think electronic signatures may have narrower application than might be thought. Executives and directors of medium or larger companies will have their secretaries doing all the printing, scanning and emailing – the traditional method, involving them putting pen to paper for 2 seconds, will remain much easier for them. I think they would need to do the whole electronic process themselves for it to be safely authentic, unless perhaps more specific software was developed reducing their input to one click.
What every company (with or without secretaries) would love to be able to do is “sign” by simple email ackowledgement. Courts seem to be willing to accept this without too much fuss, as if the email has come from your account you need to convince the court that someone else was using it to repudiate it. But I would never want to do it unless the timing was desperate.
I am fond of another on-line electronic signature suite: http://www.conxpoint.com/
Although our technology committee has a full agenda, I hope to one day get our firm to consider this means of document execution. I appreciate Art’s comments about bigger companies, but for many of us the means to have clients sign documents electronically enables us to deliver our services much more cost-effectively.