It’s been an interesting few months for e-signatures in law. Just my opinion: none of the platforms are yet in a place where they really cater well “out of the box” for transaction signing processes run by law firms. Anybody looking at this area I welcome your thoughts
1️⃣ First and foremost, a signing process is a mission critical thing for lawyers. Once we trigger the signing process, things become pretty urgent and people get scared. Responses need to be snappy where people are having technical issues
2️⃣ Many transactions involve 100s of signatories in different time zones. Often documents need to be executed at a specific time. We can’t wait to trigger the process until the document is fully ready. People need to get signatures in advance + delegate authority to release
In other words, you need the ability to gather signatures for documents that are not yet final. If you tamper with a document after it is signed through an e-signature product, it generates an error in the PDF. Right now, you can get rid of that by printing to PDF
It’s standard practice to confirm w/ the signatory after they have signed when changes have been made to the doc. If not a deed lawyers get this confirmation in the “leanest way possible” (ie. not a full blown signature request) and then grant authority to release the signature
👆🏼this process is key. The problem is “not everybody is going to be available to sign in the small timeframe after the doc is ready and before it needs to be executed”. So you buy time by getting signatures earlier, and then have a final confirmation through lawyers
2️⃣ Dating the document once signed is a big thing for lawyers. You can do it in existing products, but it’s a hacky workaround: as a lawyer, I “sign” the document but I drag a text field in rather than a signature block
3️⃣ The permissions models don’t always match lawyers’ conceptual models. Particularly with witnessing there are inconsistencies I see creep in, eg when signing multiple docs, if by default a witness can see more docs than the person they are witnessing... 🤦
On permissions, make sure the user experience makes it 100% clear what people will see and what people will not see. It needs to be a confirmatory step, I think. This is a very common “I’m scared” question
4️⃣ Integrations with third party ID verification services for QES and AES have to work and work well. It is bad news when the integration fails, and it blocks the entire signing process for others
5️⃣ Lawyers are control freaks. They do not like emails being sent to important clients without their knowledge. At the least, tell them when emails are sent (eg. on signing request, on the thing being effective) and who gets them (eg. should we send a final copy to witnesses?)
Ultimately people want control over this stuff. Lawyers want to be seen as the ones delivering value in the signing process, not a no-reply email address. Let lawyers take the credit for sending those “rock and roll” emails to tell everyone things are signed
6️⃣ Often, really senior people at our clients are signing documents. We need a decent mechanism to at least re-send them the link or signature request. Again you can do this with most, albeit with a hacky workaround
7️⃣ SendGrid is able to detect when emails bounce or when they are opened. If somebody hasn’t opened an email with a signature request, we need to know this after a given timeframe
Otherwise it’s very easy to look stupid when it’s been blocked by their spam filters, a couple of days pass, and only then do they say “we never got it”. Systems should do their best to track this for us
At the moment we have to (1) tell people we are sending them a signature request (2) send them the signature request (3) confirm they got it. But (3) ultimately is a bit of a beast, as we have to separately track this for every signatory
Clients tell us their inboxes are overflowing. It is not helpful to have to send them emails that are not important or necessary
▶️ One final note. Vendors in the space seem to think we are only interested in e-signatures because of the digital signature / certificate of completion thing
Think back to how we executed documents for the last 20 years. Signatories signed documents in wet ink and sent them back. Often their PA sent them back
I have never seen an instance, at least in the commercial world, where anything has been disputed around “but I didn’t sign it - somebody faked my signature”. (I recognise this may be more of an issue in other contexts)
But the key thing we are interested in is the structuring and optimisation of an old process so we can deliver more value to our clients. It is not *primarily* around security or people faking others’ signatures
👆 Thread about my thoughts on e-signatures after working with them for a few months now
