I just had to send some forms to my accountant (surprise, surprise). I’ve always heard that a signed document which is faxed to a recipient is kosher, legality-wise. How about as an email attachment? I’m trying to stamp out faxes in my lifetime, because I view them as an abomination, but there still seems to be resistance to going to email, in the legal community.
I think it is somewhat at the discretion of whomever is receiving the document. I don’t know if there is substantial precedence in the courts on this (IANAL).
I work for a federal contractor. We do business with an agency with Dept. of Ed. and they recently accepted my signature on a contract submitted as a PDF file via email.
I think the real focus should be on accepting electronic signatures, that is, digital certificates, which are actually more secure than ink signatures, but society is just not there yet.
I know that people who review documents for the National Flood Insurance Program will take a pdf scan of an original (these must bear engineers’ stamp & seal) via email.
Attorneys in my work-loop are divided on the issue. One caveat about transmitting documents to attorneys: it is my understanding that Opposing Counsel can request copies of all correspondence; you may wish to hand-carry sensitive documents.
That is the complete opposite of my understanding, which is that all attorney-client communications are privileged, no matter what the media; and that additionally, non-privileged documents would be subject to discovery whether or not they were sent via fax or mail.
Could someone confirm?
Depends on what you are signing and to whom. In most cases it’s ok these days. I send lots of pdfed documents that serve as originals these days.
Wait. What?
- Opposing Counsel where and when?
- The fact that you hand-deliver something doesn’t make it not correspondence.
- If it is correspondence that falls into a legal privilege, it’ll be covered by that privilege whether it is delivered by carrier pigeon, bottle, or U.S. mail. If it isn’t; not.
- The fact that someone can request something does not mean they will get it.
Perhaps my understanding is flawed. 
The attorneys I work with operate as if emails were easier to get (during discovery, perhaps?) while some other forms of written communication are not. IANAL, YMMV, my attorney buddies may be off base. That’s why I said “it’s my understanding” instead of “this is the way it is”. My apologies if my statement was misleading.
No problem. I just didn’t understand what you were getting at. It’s true that emails create a record of the communication which will make it more difficult to deny the communications took place later on. Of course, if you get caught lying about the existence of documents, that’s usually a bad thing.
It occurs to me that it was stupid of me to post anecdotal evidence in GQ. I don’t like it when people do it with engineering questions and it’s just as rude for legal questions.
I’m going to go sit in the corner now. 
well, i just changed from a stint in the contract compliance department of a rather major [in it’s industry] company, and other than an incredibly tiny number or people who refused to get computers and fax machines … all the contracts and cancellations were done by either email, fax, or a combination of both. My work files include several hundred files of cancellations and vendor/client contracts between say another brokerage coughwaste managementcough and say a client company coughsearscough that i have been working on in the past week or so and scanned into the database system itself are something like 80 thousand contracts between our vendors and ourselves [one for each client location. we do 600 million $US a year in billing.]
I can think of maybe 25 or 30 vendors out of something like 12000 hauling companies that will only do business by mail.