Below is the signature page from a Courtyard Marriott group sales agreement I found online. I know next to nothing about electronic signatures, but I found decidedly odd the e-signature process specified in this contract. “Replace Empty Box with Blackened Box Here to Enter Into Binding Obligation”? And check out the note at the bottom about how you can do it using Word.
Can anyone explain this to me and where it fits in electronic-signature doctrine?
Ken:
Any act, intended to be an electronic signature, can be an electronic signature. But you would not want to rely on an action as an electronic signature if that action was easy to do by mistake. So they adopted an action that was readily available, but hard to do by accident. It is why a lot of click-through agreements require two clicks and many systems get you to draw something as your signature. This one is odd, but not unreasonable.
Chris
Marriott is apparently too cheap to subscribe to Docusign or Hellosign.
Ken, this is hilarious.
We used to see this approach 20+ years ago, when business were dipping their toes in the murky and uncharted waters of “going electronic.” The unfamiliarity with the advantages of digital transactions often led to procedures that demanded more effort and caused more confusion than simply doing the transaction on paper. This is a painful example of such an process.
While this oddball process is technically in line with ESIGN and UETA — at least for commercial transactions that do not involve a consumer — it is cumbersome, outdated and unnecessary.
Ken Moyle