I’m looking into this because I work in a field where I need people to sign stuff.
I signed up for a free trial of Adobe Echo just to see how it works. Basically you upload a document, add a signature box where you want the person to sign, send by email, and then the person signs it by clicking the signature box. You can either type your name which Adobe edits to make it look like a signature, or you can draw the signature with your mouse.
It looks good but there are a few things that might be problematic. First, the signature doesn’t look like your signature. Second, when you sign it, Adobe adds a line with your name under the signature. If you already have a signature line on the original document it just doesn’t look too good. Third, some people unfamiliar with the law might not accept an e-signature. And finally, some people unfamiliar with the law might not want so sign electronically.
Does anyone use this? How is your experience with it?
We used an online e-sign software for a year to send out contracts to clients. Only about 10% of them used it, the rest printed it out, signed it and emailed/faxed it back, so we stopped using the service.
I just got done selling my parents’ house from out of town. The real estate agent sent me almost all the documents to e-sign, and everything went great. I was happy for the convenience, since I tend to procrastinate when I have to actually send things through the mail and I don’t have a fax machine.
I just bought a townhouse in the USA, and the realtor used DocuSign (add a .com for the website) for a lot of the signatures. Worked pretty well. Both me and the seller could sign an addendum to a document within 20 minutes, and then it would get emailed to us with signatures.
It was called Dotloop (or at least that’s what the emails said.) You had a choice of different styles of signature, or I think you could actually make your own signature if you wanted to. Not sure…I used one of the prefab ones because it was easier. It said something like “<My name>, executor of the estate of <Dad’s name>”)
I do work for a publisher that uses e-sign software now. I have no idea what sort, but so far everyone’s cooperated, most of them happily. We also work mostly remotely with authors, and publish mainly ebooks, so I’m not surprised. IIRC, mine was the last contract anyone signed on dead tree, and that was about six or seven months ago, so I don’t know if we’ve had time to rack up any complaints, either.