| The legal rules around formality are somewhat complicated. To give you an idea, here are the broad laws in England and Wales. Not a lot of formality is required for most contract signing, and so long as the other side of a contract is sure that you signed it, a PDF signed in a standard PDF editor like Preview is almost certainly fine. But if you are making a deed, there are attestation requirements under s1 of the Law of Property (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1989 - see https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1989/34/section/1 If a company is executing a document, it has to follow the rules in sections 43 to 47 of the Companies Act 2006. See https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2006/46/part/4/crosshea... For property transactions, there's still an issue in use of e-signatures. There's a statutory scheme for "e-conveyancing" set out in Part 8 of the Land Registration Act 2002 which gives the Land Registry the ability to set up provision for using e-signatures for formalities that previously required wet ink signatures. They never got round to actually implementing this up until COVID restrictions made it somewhat impractical to get wet ink signatures so made a temporary change to allow it. When the COVID restrictions were lifted, they've gone back to the old practice but have promised that they're totally going to sort out a permanent solution. Whether they will is another matter. See https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/electronic-signat... I've personally used an iPad with an Apple Pencil to sign and have attested a (non-company) deed that had to comply with the LP(MP)A requirements and nobody seemed to have any trouble with it. I suspect the target audience of a lot of e-signature SaaS products are companies where there are teams managing a lot of documents being signed across multiple jurisdictions, and juggling between sales, in-house legal and so on. Most of the problems those products are solving are likely business process issues rather than strictly legal requirements. |