"When you need someone’s signature on a document, your best-laid plans come to a screeching halt," IT consultant Peggy Gruenke writes at Attorney at Work. "That process typically involves printing the document, hand-signing it yourself, mailing or scanning or faxing to the other party—and then waiting for them to print, sign and mail, fax or scan and send it back to you, where it’s printed yet a third time and filed away in a cabinet forever."
An alternative is to use a cloud-based e-signature service, Gruenke writes. But are e-signed contracts legal?
"The U.S. government actually took the biggest step in resolving the legal issues of e-signatures back in 2000 with the U.S. Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act (E-SIGN), which gave e-signatures the same legal weight as handwritten ones," Gruenke writes. "State law, for the most part, has followed suit in recognizing their validity." Documents that require notarization are one exception.
E-signing services apply security at three levels: user authentication that links the signature to a specific person; document authentication, which prevents the document itself from being modified; and process authentication, which proves "what took place during the signing process. This is accomplished by recording all the URLs visited, documents, legal disclosures and actions taken by users in a way that enables the process to be accurately reproduced from start to finish."(online)
