How to Create Electronic Signatures

Electronic signatures have become quite popular for their convenience. You no longer have to print a document, sign, scan it, and then email it back. Electronic signatures or eSignatures can replace your handwritten signatures digitally to speed up virtually any paper-driven, manual signature process. And they are being used to optimize business processes for several documents. Some examples include:

• Sales contracts
• New hire documentation
• Employee agreements
• Purchase orders
• Vendor agreements
• NDAs
• Letters of Intent
• Expense reporting
• Invoice processing

Several industries are using electronic signature solutions to optimize their processes and bring efficiencies. For instance,

• Healthcare is transforming its patient workflows while complying with HIPAA and other privacy regulations.
• Real Estate is using them to reduce delays by speeding up processing for real estate and title insurance forms as well as closing documents and escrow agreements.
• Self-Storage is using them to optimize utilization and boost profitability by filling and signing tenant agreements, updating master service agreements, and contract notification provisions.
• Legal is speeding up their client business by streamlining and automating the e-sign process with sales and services forms and legal notices.
• Insurance is using them to streamline their client applications and claims forms workflows.
• Financial Services are capturing and sharing sensitive information securely with their clients through seamless, paperless modes.

Digital Signatures vs. Electronic Signatures

We have been asked the question lately about Digital Signature vs. Electronic Signature in the context of recording agreements on documents. Most people get confused about this, but it’s quite simple. An Electronic Signature is a legal term defining what constitutes a record of intent to form an agreement while a Digital Signature is digital authentication technology.

Many countries have made laws that define an Electronic Signature. The Global and National Commerce Act of 2000 (the ESIGN Act) in the U.S. defines (paraphrased) an electronic signature as a sound, symbol, or mark, made with intent to sign (applied to a document) logically associated with the content.

If the electronic signature meets the legal definition, only then does it become a legal electronic signature. But what makes the legal electronic signature strong evidence if there is ever a dispute as to who agreed to what with whom? Here, one should look to see whether the record that memorializes the electronic signature, (sound, symbol, or mark) logically associated with the content, agreed to include other metadata (a fancy term for data about the data record itself) related to the transaction.

An example of strong metadata about the eSign transaction record that can provide strong evidential weight to the record is:

• An audit trail that records the timestamps and server/IP addresses associated with sending, delivery, opening, and signoff.
• The audit trail, including timestamps, content, and electronic "sound, symbol, or mark," which are packaged together in a form that can be authenticated - determined untampered, authentic, original content.

Digital signatures fulfill this gap. They are a technical term for an encrypted hash of a set of data (that set of data in this context being an electronic signature applied to a PDF record with agreement content and transaction metadata, for example).

Only a few electronic signature services (RSign, a global e-signing solution by RPost, and the few that have licensed RSign patents) combine electronic signature capture processes with digital signature authentication technology to give a record of the agreement that is court-admissible with strong evidential weight.

For more information: https://rsign.com/learn/create-electronic-signatures