Question

Using Forms For Contract Management

Forms

Updated November 3, 2015

asked on November 3, 2015 • Show version history

I know the obvious business answer for this question is DocuSign, but for a myriad of reasons our firm isn't 100% sold on DocuSign.

The question is quite simple, can I create a form that has several blocks of text and the only field that needs to be filled in is the signature? What I want to create is something like a fee addendum or a limited power of attorney that is a static document that I can place on the Forms portal for a client to digitally sign.

0 0

Replies

replied on November 3, 2015

Hi Jeff,

In short the answer to this question is yes I'm sure you can do this with forms. However what you need to be careful of in situations like this, is that unless the digital signature is verified by a trusted source then it isn't legally binding, hence where the likes of Docusign will trump any custom solution.

Hope this helps!

1 0

replied on November 3, 2015

A large majority of our client base is international so for those instances DocuSign isn't the best for verifying identity. Our workaround for this is that some type of security question etc. would be designated with the client to verify their identity.

0 0

replied on November 3, 2015

Hmmm possibly would work.

But I would check if this would hold up in court from a legal standpoint. Best to be sure!

0 0

replied on November 3, 2015

If your firm isn't sold on DocuSign (or the other vendors) I'm not sure how a Q&A with a public Laserfiche Form would satisfy their unease. Most 3rd party signature products provide a Q&A or shared secret authentication option.

Both Laserfiche Forms and 3rd party signing products capture the IP address and information submitted and would have similar legal enforceability. The downside would be an aggressive lawyer could question your internal control of the process while having it hosted with a 3rd party vendor would bring their controls into question instead of yours.

It still would come down to proving to the court the method of establishing identity through your Q&A is acceptable, the client was presented the same information captured with their signature, etc.

Here's a document outlining some common legal questions. *Full Disclosure* From 2010, with US law in mind, and prepared by a company with commercial interest in the area.

Producing-Persuasive-Electronic-Evidence.pdf (335.43 KB)

| Download

3 0

replied on November 3, 2015

It is actually hard to do with Forms if you are wanting to display a custom HTML field and dynamically populate portions of the text within it. There are multiple posts on Laserfiche Answers about trying to accomplish this and none of them have any really good answers. Hopefully this is something Laserfiche is working on for a future version.

0 0

replied on November 3, 2015 • Show version history

One thing I want to make clear is that Forms signatures is not a Digital Signature in the way that DocuSign (or Laserfiche Server Dig Sigs) are. It is not protected by external certificate validation, and there's no validity/document manipulation check associated with it. It's a visual representation of the users signature, matching the behavior of a user signing a paper form that is then scanned into the system.

This is basically what Chris said in the first comment, but I wanted to emphasize that. Obviously written signatures on paper are legally binding so in any given case this may be as well, but it is explicitly not a Digital Signature of the type you'd get with an external signature service like DocuSign or Laserfiche Digital Signatures.

0 0

You are not allowed to follow up in this post.

Question

Question

Using Forms For Contract Management

Replies

Sign in to reply to this post.