ESIGN: Easy

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Ever order a birthday or Christmas gift from amazon.com? Ever use your credit card to buy a kitchy item from ebay? Ever buy concert tickets online using your checking account or debit card number? If so, you’re already familiar with electronic signatures.

What you may not be familiar with, however, are the legalities behind simply clicking a checkmark box before hitting “Continue.”

Luckily, the law is pretty straightforward about what constitutes a “legal” signature in the 21st century. With ESIGN (Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act) and UETA (Uniform Electronic Transactions Act), there’s no need to put a pen to your screen to sign documents electronically.

Completely Legal

The ESIGN legislation enacted on June 30, 2000, very clearly states that any electronic signature is just as valid as any hand written signature. The UETA gives legal binding status to any electronic form or signature it produces.

More Secure

Not only are electronic signatures completely legal, in some ways, they’re even more secure than traditional pen and ink signatures.

Unlike forgeries, electronic signatures have to pass the scrutiny of computers, so unless you know that password exactly, you're not going to be able to forge a signature. And unlike the traditional name with 26 different possible characters, most passwords today use a combination of letters, numbers and symbols. With the average keyboard housing 114 different key types, the password possibilities are endless, making it nearly impossible to forge a signature.

Some systems, like DotLoop, even require a unique question be answered when requesting a password change, adding a further layer of security to a signature process, so, even if you know a user’s e-mail address, you may not be able to change their password without information only they would know.

Electronic signatures have helped create a more efficient, effective, and trackable signature system than the old pen and paper autographs of yore. Nilesh Patel, an attorney for the Frost Brown Todd law firm in Cincinnati, says it best.

“You can attack a contract on many fronts, on the grounds of consumer protection, fraud, authenticity, etc. But your reason for striking it cannot be that the signature was made electronically.”