The reason you sign something is to show clear intent that you intended to agree to something.
Nobody’s under the impression a paper signature cannot be forged either. It’s no different.
It’s social not mathematical.
>Why do we need them at all?
Why not just email the contract, and the person replies back with "I agree to this"? Simpler and cheaper than paying $150/year.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/253523/how_to_make_sure_that...
> The second class of signatures, which Parmar uses all the time in her practice, is signing one's name to a document electronically by typing your name in one of the following formats:
> For submissions to the Federal court system: /s/Angela West
> For submissions to the Patent & Trademark Office: /Angela West/
> Both the // and the /s/ methods are considered to be legitimate signatures under the Federal E-Sign act, and acceptable enough for the legal industry.
Here's proof of that where Federal courts are concerned: https://www.cand.uscourts.gov/ecf/signatures
A formal contract with a real ink signature makes things easier, but it's often not required.
Come to think of it, I remember "signing" pdfs in adobe reader by clicking a form field that produced a signature similar to[1]:
John Smith
Digitally signed by
CN=John Smith
[...]
[1] https://helpx.adobe.com/content/dam/help/en/acrobat/11/using...
[2] https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/11/using/signing-pdfs.html#S...
I think docusign has the best sustinct summary of the bare requirements needed for a electronicly signed document to be recognized as legally binding.
https://www.docusign.com/learn/us-electronic-signature-laws-...
Without a tool like HelloSign you need to email the document to each person one by one to get everyone to sign on the same "paper". It's a mess and takes up a lot of time and coordination.
With HelloSign (and other similar tools), you can just send out an email with a link to everyone at once. They can sign the document asynchronously in whichever order they want, and when everyone has done that, you get a notification.
(At a past job I was asked to work on a digital signature product and very much the core and just about only requirement was digital ink square that worked on an iPad. Everything else didn't matter so long as they had some bitmap of some scrawl that someone attempted with a finger or an iPad stylus.)
Want a green check box in reader, provider cumbersome instructions for your end users to trust public cert . Or pay adobe their annual fee for a special signing cert..
Being able to just click-sign through a lease that requires almost every other page to be signed is a godsend. My hand genuinely got tired before, and quite frankly, I've lived here over 11 years, and there's not going to be anything in the lease I don't already know, so I don't really give a shit about going slowly through the damn thing.
In my case, it's better for consistency too. My signature is just a random scribble, so at least with DocuSign it'll now look identical on every page whereas it's different every time if I write by hand. The only thing I really care about is my initials, because I insist on writing my initials as a three-way ligature, and DocuSign is great about that, too. DocuSign will let you either pick one of many fonts or let you mouse-draw it, and you can make that decision separately for your signature and your initials. So I just pick one of their stock fonts for my signature and then mouse-draw my initials.
The best way to see signatures, in my IANAL opinion, is as layers of protection. The goal is that the person who signs the agreement has total understanding of what they are signing, and there is a paper trail of intent to abide by the agreement.
To that degree, if the agreement is important and you have a lot on the line if the counterparty decides to re-neg on the agreement, you should probably not do the above. But going in the opposite direction and insisting on notaries and wet ink might go too far in respect to how much effort is required.
It’s also problematic when you deal with an asshole, as it’s difficult to determine who has the correct version of the message.
The way the law looks at signatures is about the signaling of intent. The way engineers/tech look at signatures is more about trust and identity. There is some overlap of course, but if the agreement to be signed is of any real importance, nobody is going to take the chance that the identity is false or that there were no witnesses or a mis-understanding of what is in the agreement, so signing is done with wet ink.
Its no less secure than faxing signed documents.
There is a government appointed 3rd party company that manages the signing keys (BankID). They implement APIs that others, such as banks, telecom and utility companies can integrate with to make use of digital signatures that are legally binding. The signed documents are stored by the service and the initiating party (the bank).