[gamblor956]

The problem with being in this space is that you need to have the financials to be around for long enough to be useful. For legal documents, that means a 3+ year horizon.

Right now, you might work for low-risk (meaning, essentially no risk of contract disputes) short-term gigs for freelancers and consultants, but you're a no-go for businesses of any size, or anyone else that needs a contract signed.

You need to demonstrate stability before you can expand from the short-term niche, or else that your signature/document validation service will survive the likely death of your company.

[Muromec]

Nobody is in fact disputing their signatures in court.

[gamblor956]

That in fact happens all time time with signatures...

A signature can be used to validate the existence and legitimacy of a contract and the terms contained within a specific version of a contract, so disputes over signatures happen quite frequently. Indeed, DocuSign spent years establishing that their system could be used to authenticate signatures and the documents they were attached to so they could break into the legal market.

[Muromec]

That's just the nice story DocuSign have to tell to deal with other people having their interests. It's not an actual fact of life.

[gamblor956]

It's not just a nice story. Law students learn about the importance of signatures on contracts during their first few weeks of law school.

Try getting a contract honored without a signature. You'll get laughed out of court. And unless they're you're best bud, you'll get laughed at by your counterparty for your naivete. Good luck proving the existence of an agreement with a piece of paper that the other party disputes.

[semi-extrinsic]

I tried reading how to use DocuSign with eIDAS for a Qualified signature, which is the legal requirement in the EU. And it is such a mess that the DocuSign documentation [1] links to a page at passkeys.dev [2] which explicitly states in the first paragraph that it should not be linked to from user-facing documentation...

[1] https://support.docusign.com/s/document-item?language=en_US&...

[2] https://passkeys.dev/device-support/

[Muromec]

Where does the requirement come from? eIDAS regulation [0] establishes different signature profiles, from which qualified is the strongest, but doesn't say you can't use advanced or the basic electronic "draw here" kind of signature with no cryptography.

Sure, some national laws may require qualified with long term storage and implement it as part of closed document system, but people use less-than-qualified documents all the time.

[0] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=uriserv:...

[jackvalentine]

Might well be the case but the only disputes I’ve ever been involved in were one of two categories:

- yeah the agreement says that but sue us we’re not doing it

- we interpreted that clause to mean something different, pay us more or sue us.

Never anyone disagreeing about which version of the contract was the legit one.

I’m not sure what level of business that both happens, and is serious enough to litigate - I’m not able to picture it.