How To Sign Form for Legal

How To Sign Form for Legal

With so many facets of modern life being automated, signatures being easy to forge, and given how difficult it is to prove based on signature alone whether a given person actually signed something, using a person’s exact signature “design” for verification purposes after the fact is rapidly going the way of the Dodo. This leads us to the question of the day- given all this, is there any rule about what exactly your signature has to look like? Can you, for example, just sign all your legal documents with a big X like they do in cartoons? As it turns out, just like it’s possible to cash those big novelty checks because there’s no rule about what a check has to look like or be made of (just what information needs to be included), you can, in many regions of the world, sign a document in any way you wish. This is because a signature from a legal standpoint is just proof that you considered and accepted something. Or to quote the U.S.’ Uniform Commercial Code §3-401(b): A signature may be made (i) manually or by means of a device or machine, and (ii) by the use of any name, including a trade or assumed name, or by a word, mark, or symbol executed or adopted by a person with present intention to authenticate a writing. In other words, even if you sign a document in the U.S. and many other parts of the world with an ultra-detailed drawing of an anatomically correct phallus, you’re still legally bound by the terms of that document because it’s the act of signing a document that matters, not the signature itself. This is why it’s possible to sign documents using a stamp, pencil, printed signature, digitally online or even simply by typing your name at the end of an email message in which you discuss and state you agree to some deal. In fact, there has been a long precedent of such electronic remote agreements going all the way back to the telegraph, such as an 1869 case Howley v. Whipple in which a U.S. court determined that agreeing to terms in a telegram was indeed legally binding, with the court stating in part: When a contract is made by telegraph… if the parties authorize their agents… to make a proposition on one side, and the other party accepts it through the telegraph, that constitutes a contract in writing under the statue of frauds… it makes no difference whether [the telegraph] operator writes with a steel pen an inch long attached to an ordinary penholder, or whether his pen be a copper wire a thousand miles long. Nor does it make any difference that in one case common record ink is used, while in the other case a more subtle fluid, known as electricity, performs the same office. Granted, exact rules vary a little from region to region and some specific institutions might have internal rules regarding what is an acceptable signature and...