How To Electronic signature Form for Legal

How To Electronic Signature Form for Legal

I have Manny Fitzsimmons I'm your Washington Realtors Legal Hotline lawyer today's topic of discussion is electronic signatures most contracts it seems our sign today using electronic signatures and that's great the electronic signatures are authorized by both state and federal law and there is no problem with the enforceability of a contract based on an electronic signature but we are seeing a few things in the industry that that need your attention first when you are going to send documents to parties for electronic signatures you need to make sure that you have a proper authorization from the parties identifying the email address as to which they want the contract sent for their electronic signature oftentimes we are seeing contracts that a single purchase and sale agreement is sent to one email address even though there are two separate signers now it's entirely possible that two different people are accessing the contract through that email address and both of them are signing properly the purchase and sale agreement it's also possible that one person alone is accessing that email address and signing that contract for both people in other words committing forgery it is not your job to police whether or not clients are committing forgery you can't help or prevent people from committing forgery but you should have documentation in your transaction file showing that you have emailed the document for electronic signature to the email address as identified by if there's more than one party by both parties I'm more than one person in your client party then to all of the people who are individually clients within your party another issue that we're seeing with respect to electronic signatures is brokers apparently not grasping the notion that forgery of an electronic signal is exactly the same thing as forgery of a wet signature which creates both criminal and civil problems for a broker who might do that we are seeing occasions where brokers rather than forwarding a document to the client for electronic signature are affording the document to their own email address and applying the electronic signature for their client as though their client had done it sometimes this is done with the clients permission to say hey go ahead and sign those documents for me it's easier if you just do it sometimes actually it's being done without the clients permission because it's just more efficient in the brokers mind to be able to handle what appears to be a routine signing on a document it's not okay whether it's with the clients permission or without the clients permission if you don't if you're not holding the power of attorney for your client then the clients oral acknowledgement to you go ahead and sign that for me is not sufficient and we've already done a video about the bad practice of a broker holding a power of attorney for a client so we will repeat that lesson here suffice to say it's never a...