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Comment by whitej125 | Hacker News Reader

We use DocuSign here and the amount of time I spend hopping back and forth (exporting and importing) between Google and DocuSign is annoyingly high. If Google were to enter this space... I would personally welcome it.

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Personally I found the entire design and the organization of files/docs/sheets between Google Drive and other apps in the Google ecosystem is confusing as hell. There was no way to follow a specific hierarchy and the commenting/reviewing system felt clunky.

Wish I never had to use this Google suite of products if it wasn't for my employer.

You would hate Microsoft 365 then. I find Google Drive extremely clean and easy to use.

Maybe you should give it another look. Hierarchy eas terrible because it was originally designed to have tags instead of folders and these were prone for cyclic references. When they implemented folders they implemented them on top of tags and things never worked out great.

It got a lot simpler since they nuked tags in favor of folders.

I think if any enterprise reevaluated their e-signature needs they'd decide they don't need it at all. There's just better ways to track consents and contracts.

Could you elaborate on this? I'd love to stop collecting signatures, but I can't imagine an alternative.

Checking a box while logged in is unequivocally superior to e-signature. What are you actually solving with e-signature? What bank requires you to Docusign anything to create an account or authorize a transaction? Do you e-sign when you read the Apple terms of service? You could literally stop using Docusign and replace it with nothing. It's there for old-school lawyers to feel secure and not have to worry about precedent which stopped being relevant years ago. Clicking "accept" on a little popup is legally enforceable for GDPR.

If you're doing contracts, how about a webform where you ask the signatories to answer 5 questions to prove they understand the terms then click submit? That is miles more legally defensible than an e-signature.

Gotcha, so contracts are still necessary (red-lining, customer specific terms, retention, etc.) but e-signature should just be a checkbox. Is that right? If so, then yeah, I think that's fine except it doesn't obviate the need for DocuSign. The e-signature is probably just a relic/reflection of what users expect in order to add a layer of professionalism.

I think this is the death of docusign right here that we’re witnessing

Yeah, unless Google kills this product in 2 years, which has a quite high probability.

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