[thathndude]

Lawyer here. Not legal advice. Really not that much by way of law to consider. If everyone agrees that an E-signature is good, then, generally speaking, an e-signature is good. I’d suggest it’s more on the people actually drafting the documents being signed than the software layer facilitating.

[ildon]

Lawyer here as well, but from Europe. Here the same is true, unless the government is involved.

Documents from/to any agency, including anything that has any tax relevance, - generally speaking (there are many caveats) - shall be signed with services compliant with the e-signature standards provided by Regulation 2014/910/EU (in short: PADES, CADES, XADES).

Out of curiosity: is there a similar requirement in terms of e-signature in the US when documents need to be sent to some agency, such as the IRS?

[graemep]

Not a lawyer, but I know the position in the UK is pretty simple and much the same.

The purpose of someone like Docusign is to provide a trusted third party to provide evidence.

For most purposes GPG signed email (or anything else with a similar signature) would work perfectly well provided you could prove who the keys belong to. In fact it would be better than DOcusign who can (from the few documents I have signed) ultimately only really show they sent an email with a signing link to your email address.

The last one from them has a warning:

"Do Not Share This Email This e-mail contains a secure link to DocuSign. Please do not share this e-mail, link or access code with others."

[tomatocracy]

Not a lawyer but I do deal with contracts under English law day in day out for my day job.

Docusign always saves the IP addresses and timestamps for any signatures. In addition it can be set up to require 2FA prior to accepting a signature - eg our lawyers will set it up to require an SMS 2FA confirmation and I've heard them say that this is a hard requirement for deeds as opposed to simple contracts (tho whether that's down to law firm policy, Docusign policy or court precedent I don't know).

[dlandau]

For most purposes a normal email with no signatures is fine too.

[alexopensource]

True. Even if one party from the signers dont trust e-sign, it wont work. But the number of people thinking an E-signature is good is only increasing day by day.

[menzoic]

I think by everyone they meant everyone involved in the contract being signed