We are big fans of digital signing. We use it regularly ourselves, and recommend it to our customers. We can also help our customers start to use it effectively.

Traditional paper-based signing processes have always had a number of problems, including:

• The need to link them with approval processes (see our suggested process for that here)
• The time and effort involved in printing, signing, scanning, emailing, chasing, and collating counterparts (particularly in a COVID-19 environment)
• The difficulty in identifying hold-ups (for example, people who are unavailable) and how to deal with them
• People not signing documents in the way required, or missing areas where they must sign or initial
• The risk that someone changes a document without informing other parties
• Difficulties in reconciling signatures on documents to the name of the signatory, and their capacity to bind the party
• The frequent loss of original documents, and the misfiling of scanned copies

While digital signing is not complex to use anyway, and you can start in a low-risk way with things like contract approvals as set out here, when combined with document automation and integrated into Office 365, it becomes incredibly simple.

Our solutions can include:

• Use of document automation to automatically create a signing block for every party to the contract
• Making sure that each signing block also includes a “smart tag” which pre-identifies each signatory for that signing block, including names, email addresses and phone numbers
• Launching the signing process directly from Outlook, Word or SharePoint
• Having the signed document returned automatically to the SharePoint folder it was initiated from, and also to another email or location if required
• You can see this webinar for some examples of how a process can work:

Expected benefits include:

• Substantial time savings in managing signing (and related approval) processes
• Significant cost savings (it's very low cost!)
• Nobody can change a signature or a document without invalidating the document
• Full transparency and auditability as to who signed what, when, and how, reducing the risk of a dispute later
• You should never lose another contract again