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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

Then that leads to my second question

>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.

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Because the ceremony of a signature has been socially recognised for thousands of years. That's what our society expects.

>Because the ceremony of a signature

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
   [...]

This would satisfy the "ceremony" requirement. According to adobe[2] it looks like you can do this with self signed certificates, so it's completely free as well. But this option is significantly less popular than hellosign/docusign. I guess the value-add for them is having a web interface, but I'm not convinced it's worth the $150/year (significantly more for "business" or "enterprise" plans) for a web interface that essentially signs pdfs with self-signed certificates.

[1] https://helpx.adobe.com/content/dam/help/en/acrobat/11/using...

[2] https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/11/using/signing-pdfs.html#S...

You can even satisfy the ceremony of signature in a pdf document by inserting your hand drawn signature in Preview.

Goodluck with that holding up in court.

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-...

The main benefit is around workflows. First and foremost, if you are in a position where you need external people to sign documents (say you're a photographer and need signed releases), it's a lot easier to send someone a link to the standard document and get them to sign a release then to email them and then call the person and walk them through digitally signing a document. Especially if you're doing this 50+ times a year. And you typically get the documents signed much quicker. It's pretty much the difference between having to mail in a check for every payment vs using a web portal. It's more convenient and there's a faster turnaround time. Oh and you've removed the risk that something isn't signed correctly (was there a section that wasn't initialed?) or that something was redlined. It's certainly not for everyone or every business, but there are certain use cases where the money is well worth it.

It's also a huge win if you need multiple people to sign a document.

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.

So many people still put such huge value on the "handwritten signature" part. Even though it isn't actually that strong (the digital signature from even a self-signed certificate is definitely stronger), the ceremony of having something that you need to scrawl with your fingers or a stylus/pen still matters psychologically to so many people.

(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.)

It’s only free for a certain number of signatures per form. Then you need to buy some server side tool from Adobe, and $150/yr seems cheap.

Adobe's failure to make this easy and free is the problem. How HelloSign gets away with not also embedding digital signatures is the amazing part. Physical signatures are terrible security, at least when we switch to digital make it better, not worse.

Adobe still gets a piece of the pie with their stupid certificate extortion scheme.

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..

MacOS’s preview app also allows you to e-sign.

Easier to argue that you were agreeing to something else, got confused, things were changed, etc. The ceremony of "hey, you are now doing something legally binding" is important socially and legally, and the process with HelloSign doesn't start and stop with the signatures, there's all the handshaking and communication around the event.

You basically can.

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

Right - and the point is that in a casual email you may reply 'yes that's fine' and is that signing a contract or not? But if we have some ceremony, like a physical signature, or using this // notation, then it's clear what your intent was.

Even a verbal contract has some weight. A "yes that's fine" reply to an unambiguous email is likely to stand up in court. "I, <full legal name> agree to this" is even better.

A formal contract with a real ink signature makes things easier, but it's often not required.

Also, using docusign, etc. are stupid simple for people's who's signatures are needing in multiple places in a document, and initials or certain pages, etc...

My townhouse complex switched from having us hand-sign paper leases to using DocuSign last year, and it's been wonderful.

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.

You can do this.

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.

Most likely backwards compatibility. You can print an email chain and bring it in front of a judge, but it's probably not going to work very well.

You can absolutely do that. It works between two parties especially when small very well, but doesn’t scale well.

It’s also problematic when you deal with an asshole, as it’s difficult to determine who has the correct version of the message.

I’ve signed offer emails and “agreement to represent” recruiter emails by just replying “I agree” a few times.

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