eSignature Legality for Life Sciences in United States: Simplify Document Management with airSlate SignNow

How to eSign a document: e-signature legality for Life Sciences in United States

good afternoon everyone and thank you for joining us for today's program I'm Andrea Terry the director of learning for the Maryland State Bar Association and our presenter today is attorney Adam Spence our program is e signatures the new reality Adam is with Spence brierley law firm in Baltimore County he's a litigator with 25 years of experience and also a frequent presenter on the use of technology in the practice of law he actually did our first webinar for us on tools for the remote practice of law when the pandemic shutdown began in March and we're happy to have him back today to discuss like of eSignatures which is obviously taken on much greater importance during this era of social distancing and seeking with in-person meetings if you'd like to pose questions during the program you can do so by typing them into the YouTube chat channel on your screen or you can also email them directly to Angela Monroe at Angela at MSBA org the email that is also at the bottom of your screen and Adam will try to get to as many questions as possible during the session we're grateful to Adam Spence for pulling together this important presentation for our MSBA audience and with that I will turn it over to Adams and Myka still muted at them hey welcome today I'm going to present a timely subject on electronic signatures preparing this program I realized that this is a pretty exciting program because it really doesn't interplay between law and technology which as a presenter on technology we don't often see if you've taken my remote working programs so this is a little bit different and I think it's quite exciting there's a lot of new things happening some of which are related to covets and this is what this program is about when you go through some introductory slides real fast and tell you a little bit about myself I do a lot of trust in the state litigation over people fighting people in families I do business disputes and I like to say I do other on civil matters because the use of our technology were able to manage some pretty difficult document intensive cases and that's why I like technology it allows me to compete and provide a superior service today you're going to hear a lot about information on this program and how we use different technologies like ever sign and Acrobat one of the things that I like to do when I present is provide a lot of materials and so what you're going to see if you go to my website which is Spence firm comm you'll see my blog post up at the top of the page which is news opinion and tech and then on the bottom right-hand side you're going to see some links there's a new link on there which is it's East signatures from A to Z that was posted this morning the links are good except for one which we're still wrapping up those materials but this presentation will be online the handouts on how to use ever sign in Acrobat will be online so I certainly encourage you to take a look at those and download some of that information after the program of course because we want you to pay attention so we start our Mountain State Bar Association seminars always with just a reminder about the resources that the bar is providing particularly in the time of code right now there is an update page this one is great free cles through June 30th I mean that is a phenomenal bargain if you know how much money CL these cost particularly if you're required to take 12 credits like I am in Virginia every year it also has some member resource page and one of the things that I would say to think about taking advantage is the weekly I guess it's a it's a issue of a group session on managing under co vid and it's managed by a social worker that is working for the State Bar and it's super helpful group I've heard a lot of good things coming out of some of the organizations I've been involved with with lawyers just the disclaimer you know there's some pretty complex stuff that we're going to talk about today I'm going to try to make it as simple as possible by simplifying things I don't want you to take the wrong impressions from them so what I do want to encourage you to do is simply look at the law and make sure that what I'm saying is what you believe is correct not what I believe is correct although we have vetted this pretty heavily before presenting today so we want to talk about the old reality you know we had these wedding signatures we needed physical delivery whether it was by scanning and emailing or by simply dropping it off we have a lot of clients that did that in the past and so you seen this physical delivery even if you're not physically delivered in your emailing it you still have to convert it to electronic so we were always finding that some of our clients particularly the individuals they don't have scanners at home they might have to have the kids either with trust and estate litigation the older people you know in their 70s 80s they may not have a fax machine or a scanner or even know how to use a computer frankly and they certainly don't know how to take a photo with their cell phone which is often how we might get signatures that are wet that have been printed out so and certain documents are going to require wet signatures so there's still some element of today's reality requiring wet signatures and I would say that probably most if not 98% of the turning use the wet ink and I'm glad to see the population of attorneys that we have on this page who are really interested in to stepping into this what I call the new reality of of signatures which is ink is for tattoos you know the signatures are a hundred percent legally binding they're actually required by e-filing when we talk about attorneys using a signature I say that most aren't using it that's the techniques we talk about in this course but many attorneys have been doing efiling they're already signing electronically and I suppose they know that it's fast and simple that's why we like it and our firm because it's easy for our clients it's really you know we're about customer service is one of our key underpinnings of my firm successes if you really struggle and and try very hard to ensure efficiency for our clients that were collaborating with them and not making their life more difficult book by empowering them to get through their problems and frankly having documents assigned is one of those ways where they can just sign it on their phone and it makes it a lot easier and clients are much happier and I think you'll find that if you adopt some of these practices today covert 19 is obviously showing the value we had been doing these signatures probably about six months before kovat hit and we were ready for it when it did hit because then as things really got difficult to sign in person you know we were just in the middle of it just having everything done because now people can't even go in the old reality to a Home Depot to fax something to us so now we're really seeing the value of not home depot Office Depot or staples we're just seeing a lot more value to it today under social distancing restrictions and every client is a mobile phone this is really key and you know when you have a mobile phone and you're used to it and you're searching on the web and you're doing your browsing on the web it's just a hop skip and a jump to start signing documents on your mobile phone using the web so I want to show you something I'm I am a tech person and some of you may know this is analytics I don't want to get too far off topic but this is an analytics from Google Analytics that analyzes my website so one of the things that you're going to see here is you have a desktop and a mobile use that's one two down on the bottom side of the page but of the visits 53% we're using desktop 41% or mobile and so these are some metrics that we're really concerned about because we want to make our websites as attorneys more user friendly this is actually lower stat the the mobile amount is lower it was higher when Kovac wasn't in effect I think now people have more time to sit at their desktop and use their desktops when code was not in effect we found that we read 51 52 % mobile and less for desktops so that that did change as a result of code but we expect that to return to normal and again emphasis on mobile use let's talk about the legality of electronic signatures you know this is probably the one reason why lawyers do not want to adopt electronic signatures or reluctant to because the concern is about is this going to be binding you know the one question we asked and the reason I put that disclaimer at the front is because if we make a mistake with our signatures and we e sign a document and then we go to court and try to have it enforced the judge may look at us and say I don't think it's binding I don't believe that this is applicable the laws that are in place both under the esign act and Malita which is the Maryland Uniform electronic transactions Act both of those are put in place specifically to alleviate those concerns but but I think there's still a level of distrust by attorneys you know I guess they say well we we think wet ink is wet ink as somebody who deals a lot with wills and codicils or of dubious origin we see wet signatures aren't always the best signatures and they often can be forged and there's no reason to think that they're necessarily any safer than electronic signatures we are going to talk about wills them a little bit because there is some import on this discussion about those so let's talk about the federal esign Act first this is a blanket application to interstate commerce which I think covers everything depending on who you listen to it it states and specifically defines electronic signatures as consisting of an electronic sound so we link here and I'm gonna play a sound if I click on that and I include that and embed that in a document and they click yes that actually is a is a signature and that's an acknowledgement and it's binding that's why you saw recently in the years past the yes is to credit card applications which I remember a time and maybe I'm getting older than I think I am when they didn't do credit cards over the phone and that really came into place yeah I think I want to say mm there may have been another law but I know that under the esign Act it permitted it and now that's why you're seeing this in addition you have a symbol that's your slash a slash or even just a signature here that's a Adobe generator signature a signal could be an axe a signal could be the slash s slash in federal court you have to do / yes / Adam M Spence you can't just do / yes / although I think you can in state court don't quote me on that you always want to look into the rules when you're signing we just use this /s for our D signs in any court or then a process and the process is can be a software click rap or when you're clicking on a document on the acceptance of terms when you're installing software or your browse that excuse me one second order your brows wrap which is the concept of when you're browsing and you see a online hey we have a browser cookie policy you want to accept that that's really a browser app policy and then it has to be attached to or logically associated with the record so the the logically associated with I think is it has to be on the document or it has to be related maybe an embedded yes clip or on the phone call or something that specifically put on the document and it has to be adopted by the person with the intent to signs that's why you when you when you do these click wraps these browser apps that's why they always make you scroll through and really you know say hey this is me and I'm signing because they want that intentionality of act to make it enforceable one of the things about the federal esign Act is there's consumer consent and disclosure requirements and and I like to talk about the Bullock wraps and browse wraps because what we see is they adopt a lot of these terms and in fact they have to by law to be binding so first the consumer must affirmatively consent to the electronic transaction not to the contract but to the transaction itself I agree I will be bound by an electronic signature and agree to use electronic signatures they can give consent online and we talk about that the cookie policies no not all browser app is enforceable Terms of Use and one of the reasons why is because the Terms of Use at the bottom OMA web page there's not a highlighted do you agree to our Terms of Use it has to be more in front of the consumer and it has to be agreed to specifically by the consumer can just be buried in the text and again click wrap is enforceable under that process that we talked about the consumer consent and disclosure under Maryland Act is very similar so you're going to see the same you're gonna see Maryland's Act basically mirroring the federal act from what I can tell it seems that the disclosures are the same and the consent is the same so let's talk about the Maryland law what we're referring to it's music you either need lawyers out there if there's any lawyers write that out there that that know how to pronounce that I'd be happy to have a pronunciation but 46 states and DC have adopted the Act in addition it confirms the validity of electronic signatures in Maryland the federal act I think supersedes and controls a lot of this but then again you have the consumer disclosure requirements let's talk about exemptions and exceptions and these are really important because when you sign a document you know there's discussion and it was a heavy discussion about assigning wills in the program on remote notarization and that right here is it specifically exempts exempted excuse me from the eSignature Act and so wills trusts I think adoption divorce and certain family matters are not permitted in addition certain notices notices of eviction notices a gas turnoff some fundamental consumer rights that of notice are not exempted so you can't just send an email as bgb and say to the consumer we're gonna cut your power off do you understand yes and suggest that that's binding in addition to that we have court orders that do not have to be again these are exceptions and exemptions it's not a the state can do it the state can adopt regulations that allow it but at least it's exempted from that regulation and can be adopted elsewhere so interestingly the handling and transportation of hazardous materials is a is an exemption in both the state and federal law I don't know why it's just sort of an interesting sort of off book maybe there's something that is important about documentation and chain of custody and maybe a physical hand to hand hazardous materials I don't know and the other thing is actually the Maryland Code says that the e-sign act those requirements cannot be modified by me you know so Maryland does recognize the importance of the federal act inherently and it's consumer disclosure requirements so let's talk about our use as a law firm these are these are just some frankly recent uses we use them for all of our engagement letters now and have been doing so for about three or four months HIPAA consent for medical records we tested that to see if the doctors would accept it and they have that we've gotten no pushback whatsoever for that to use those HIPAA so we sent it for electronic signature it gets bounced back with all of the doctor and they give us the records can you do that a lot when we need medical records and estate disputes where competency and cognitive physical decline become issues settlement agreements once we reach a settlement if we do and don't try the case we use these we've had numerous settlement agreements signed electronically by both our clients and opposing counsel we're going to get into that a little bit later about opposing counsel and their client and how we deal with electronic signatures with that layered transaction of two different people it has to go to we also done settlement distribution letters so you know right now you have the client come in they sign the check or whatever they do or you know the company pays it to you and but you still need to have the client sign something we just have me sign our settlement distribution letter and that's buying in and it's quick and we can get things moving client leashes and amendments I bring this one up this came up recently we have one particular lender has 33 separate - - strip malls but thirty three separate tenants and quite a few of them have had modifications to their leases with rent deferrals have been forbearances so we have been drafting amendments currently to allow them to sign them electronically we have two other residential landlord tenant the unit housing that are using electronic signing of leases for the residential housing it is permissible I think it's permissible I wrote a fairly lengthy article for one of my clients on this issue but we know with commercial leases it is permissible and that's a lot of what we do as well so yeah the next thing the other thing that's kind of lurking here is that you know there's a lot of laws out there on electronic signing and most people just are even aware of them unless they're in that niche and this is one of them the Uniform real property recording act yeah how does it turn somebody asked about powers of attorney and are they exempt I actually was looking at that this morning and I didn't come to an answer but I think that the answer is that they are not tested very soon you can do them but I you depth again look at the exemptions back here and this really outlines a 21 desk 102 B and see if it's really in this 102 you want to read that carefully and if it's not exempted its included again I think one of the things that we have some reluctance about as attorneys do I want to have a power of attorney electronically signed by a client and then risk having a bank not accepted once they become incompetent you know a durable medical power of attorney or rather a durable power of attorney or a durable medical power of attorney whether a bank or a health care provider and so for us as attorneys you know we want to take the safest route and so we have to be really cautious when we're adopting these and so with significant documents like financial powers of attorney you might be able to try it with something that a client just needs something manage whether away I know for instance that while real estate transactions are permitted to be signed banks won't let's cut them the lenders won't accept them so you know it's just a matter of this area is so new even though these laws Isan and mooie have been in effect now for twenty years nineteen twenty years but really the the technology and the adoption is just quickening now and so it becomes really difficult to advise whether we use a sign for really sensitive documents like powers of attorney or you know certainly wills because they're exempt powers of attorney may be exempt I don't know so I'll defer on that to take a look at the statute so let's look at the let's look at this act um this is the uniform real property electronic recording act it provides for electronic signing recording and notarized nation of documents affecting real property does not super Sutton's does not supersede the e-sign act the disclosures required by the e-sign act so then the the law is here in 2018 but I think if you talk to the majority of settlement companies they're not using it I probably never tried it because lenders are not are not using this somebody just made a mention when we talk about court orders in the trusts and estates and the rules governing orphis court everything has to be awake Inc this is something that's bothered me when I'm involved in States because of filings have to be signed by people who often are my clients potentially are a lot of them are out of state challenging actions by somebody in state related to the proceeding through passed away in state and so these these these wet ink requirements on orphans court documents it's very troubling and it always has been security now that we have m deck with me signing I'm hopeful that the orphans court bench will start to consider sort of stepping into the twentieth century but again there there are there's always a cautious approach particularly when we're dealing with testamentary issues and security and some other things and we'll talk a little bit about that later about the security and identification issues and how do we how do we resolve this so this was a big question if anybody was on that trust in the States remote notarization program which is wonderful for the information you know can remote notary Docs be electronically signed and that was a big discussion the answer is some and then I'm putting small letters unless you're afraid of judges and I do that jokingly simply because you know again thanks you know don't won't accept some of these at least that's what I'm being told by settlement companies I could see because of the nature of this that some judges might be concerned about an electronic document that's been notarized simply because it's so unusual or not seeing this in practice the rarely if ever but the law is clear let's talk about that under Rueda which was which was done years ago it it has notarization and acknowledgement and it actually says that you can ye sign a notary and that's under 21 110 so the couple's your you signatures to the designer and the notary because you're in love with the signer is already on the other document where it can sign a document and now this provides the natori alack t' under-21 110 the notary can assign so presumably if you have a camera like they did with the earlier presentation and what's been outlined by the governor's a Secretary of State on remote notarization of wills which came out under an emergency or motorisation again theoretically you could be notarized and electronically on camera and see them click a phone and say I'm signing the email you just MA and again you know we have a remote notarization order which permits the remote notary for the first time so this is really an issue that's who've just come up right because theoretically before you have a notary next to the guy and maybe tapping a tablet and he's signing in front of them and to do it and it's done this certainly would permit that appears now your remote so not only is it remote I'm watching them sign on their tablet remotely so it's pretty wild and I want to draw you back to our remote notary Law which I just added this to my program this morning 18-200 118 - 201 under the government state government article this is going to go into effect in 2020 they have advanced the remote notary law some aspects of it because of the code under the emergency orders so you know be looking for these issues to be discussed and I think if you read this statute I think you'll see confirmation there's a lot of discussion about electronic signatures it's even a definition so there's really an intentionality by the law makers to really encourage this and to move it forward and in fact that's some of the underlying leader concerns on sort of statements is this is to encourage people to move to electronic signatures there was a question about medical providers not not providing and not taking HIPAA docs you know I sent him a copy of statute and I'd say you're in violation of this code it's there's not like a power of attorney that you can present to a bank and if they refuse the if assume but that's why we we said we test it and you know again this is a brave new world so if enough people are doing that eventually the doctor is going to get it and the doctors will start to allow this and I think there's some confusion and I think part of this the the secretary of the state really needs to come out strongly with detailed information for medical providers for notaries for signing signing documents and really come up with a policy statement so that lawyers and judges and everybody can kind of refer to it could be frankly and opinion by the State Bar ethics committee because you know is it ethical to use an eSignature I'm not sure if that falls within that Valley wit but it may yeah so somebody also asked about the forum consent to electronic signatures and transactions and so luckily when we use these platforms that we're going to talk about later today they all have these terms and conditions that you click and they're gonna contain the consumer consent and disclosure requirements there they're pretty careful about this they've been in game in this game for a few years if not more and so you're gonna see that under those terms and conditions you won't necessarily see it up front one of the disclosures that you do see for instance you'll see that later today which is up front and is not varied in those small terms and conditions you agree to but it's actually specifically stated it says if you don't want to sign this or have concerns contact this person and the reason you do that is because the the disclosure requirements actually say you have to give the consumer an opt-out right and instructions on how to get it signed if they opt out so that's actually the reason we have that language it's not simply if you have any questions call your attorney it's literally you have to provide that information by law so and that's going to be again embedded within these platforms so if you if you send it and if you think about it if you send an email to a client without using the platform and they sign it you have issues with identity security and also frankly have you made the right disclosures you could be in violation of disclosure requirements if you're not saying you don't have to sign this but if you'd like you can sign it that actually is affirmative language you must use under the statutes let's go here and so one of the few things you know when I'm when I'm kind of trying to figure out what what does the remote notary allow me signing you know these are two of the several providers that actually talk about this one in particular Ronnie notary Docs it converts the traditional process of notarization to a complete electronic process so using a digital signature technology so the Secretary of State is contemplating this and but yet why is it so hard for us to find this idea that these are acceptable and I think when the the notary Act comes in in 2020 I think a lot of us will be more comfortable but even safe Docs that's another one it says the final bridge and total migration to digitizing document transactions that include a notary and they can state digital from creation to execution and return now I'm not using these from our notarization we just do it ourselves but it's clear that these companies are using assigning for notarized documents they may have hybrid which is simply doing the cameras and they have the technology for cameras and they have the superintending person or the notary and then you have your supervising attorney watching and then it's just wet ink and maybe they provide that but I didn't go that deep because when you review their website they don't have information on that and they say this and these are again providers from the Secretary of State so again this gives me a little bit more comfort to say yeah we could use we can use these vendors and we can get these each signed but again it's just something to think about get remember though and this is this really the answer to that question of can wills be signed no because again the way the the way the remote notarization works is yes you can you can remote notarize under the emergency order but the rules about these signatures still apply so if you're allowed to e sign it with a regular notary then now you can you sign with a remote notary but before remember Wills you have to be in the person and in front of them and they still do not allow more specifically or at least until the emergency button but now more specifically wills cannot and testamentary instruments cannot be assigned so there is absolutely no way that you can do that yeah Virginia several states have adopted a sign wills as a trusted States litigator I have mixed feelings because you end up with a recording of the person which is sometimes very helpful to me sometimes could be hurtful but you also have questions of authenticity and some other things that might be troublesome so this is something that Bar Association is actually struggling with on their legislative committee legislative committees to really look into these issues before we adopt a change I want to talk about that you see the Uniform Computer Information Act you know there's all these different statutes out there and if you google uniform Act transaction act you think this is the one this is only to software and it's only adopted by Maryland in Virginia it's actually a uniform Act there were so many concerns over it because software makers are liable for defects that's a big problem for software makers but they can override a the you see they also eliminated the first sale doctrine which basically says if I buy word perfect' in a software and I download it it becomes mine it's the first sale now I can sell it after I'm done with it and so you can you know now they're eliminating that through subscription plans which are actually a license so even though these were concerns now with the new subscription plans are moving towards it anyways because they're trying to get around states bomb-shelter rules which were anti you see that so it's just some interesting things to think about the American Bar Association actually is withdrawn its recommendation of adoption of this act and I think Marilyn may need to look at this and resending it giving it some some concerns but I guess they keep worry about that don't don't confuse this with electronic signatures this only applies to software although it does have an element of electronic signatures I want to talk about another issue that you want to think about which is called digital certificate signatures I don't want to get too far afield because sometimes people's eyes glaze at this point but there's this public key infrastructure which is on it's basically like it's a it's a method of a methodology of encryption and it basically it comes from my computer where I'm issued an encryption key it goes to the other computer and they're given a public key and they're able to read determine if that's my key I want to get into a 2d because it's kind of a variable and we don't really need to get into it but you have to get a digital certificate from a third party so if I go in and I want to sign something with a digital certificate I have to go to a third party certificate provider and Adobe actually refer you out to some if you want a digital certificate why do we care about it because it's really secure once you sign it it can't be tampered with because the digital key is embedded within that document and it really strengthens trust in that document if it's really important use a digital certificate I've seen some commentators say we use this for affidavits in federal court to meet you know whatever safety standard but I think that this is a bit overkill and I think that it making it more difficult with unless is a hindrance to moving forward with a signature so I sort of say look at this and a lot of the platforms that we're going to talk about actually have this embedded on their side although not necessarily side they use a sort of a hybrid digital certificate technology so it's already embedded but when you hear this term don't get too excited about it and you say get your platforms I call them digital signatures like so let's let's move right into ethical concerns you know what are we concerned about as lawyers and what do we what are we worried about too when scanning document signed so the first thing we care about is an inadvertent or unauthorized access and you may be required to take special security precautions when required by bringing up law or circumstances so a client could say I'm subject to HIPAA I need you to be more careful with this information it's protected healthcare information and you can't share you gotta keep it locked up whatever it is password normally though if I'm just having a document signed it really there's not a special security precaution although I'll talk about it in a second where there's a there's an issue that makes it more enforceable in court so you just have to use reasonable efforts and basically that means don't just say I'm gonna use this one and this doc document tool and send them an email or just do this without even thinking and looking and reviewing and researching the safety of it you're looking for things like encryption you're looking for things like validation of email recipients things like that so this is a bar opinion which is worth a read on remote working and I think it Marilyn does not as far as I can tell and I didn't really look that hard but I do because I found this and I was like this is a fantastic opinion that I've read about on a blog but this is a remote working opinion and it's a clue you need to make take reasonable steps to ensure that the reason the materials are confidential and dad is protecting backups for anti-virus things like that and then on the on the secondary part is to confirm identity in Cline's and ensure there's no lack of diminished capacity when signing so so what are appropriate safeguards to confirm identity clients and others well one of them is using the same email that you've been sending that client for months in a case on the settlement agreement sometimes when you meet with a client the first time and you have to sign a engagement letter the only identity you have is their email that they just gave you but they gave it to you and so you can relatively assure that you've confirmed their identity diminished capacity is just going to go into the situation of again taking the steps during the interview process and the meeting process to ensure this issue before things are interestingly this is what I've mentioned a second ago section 21 108 of Muta provides that the act of a person can be shown in any manner but then it says including a showing of the efficacy of any security procedure applied to determine the person so the efficacy of any security procedure so what does that mean and how does that play out for us as lawyers that are adopting these different platforms well again we're looking at the security procedures that we have is first we're going to we're going to make sure it's the person we're going to talk to him over the phone confirm their email or maybe over zoom so we can see because phone is not nearly as the security that we'd like to think it is because it could be somebody else and that's why they always say to verify multiple ways for wire transfers the other thing we do is we use pens and they're super simple so I send my email Jo client at yahoo.com and I talk to him over the phone I send it to myself sending you a document so I uses known email and I say and here's the pen and I tell him that verbally I'm not putting it in my email because that again defeats the purpose of security I give them a pen five letters three letters or numbers whatever it is you're gonna see that later and later today of how easy this is and this is not difficult it's just steps as lawyers that we need to take so it's not about five steps to start a signing with let's get let's get down to it we established at that we can do it we've established our obligations and that would then get right to it so the first thing you need to do is know Acrobat Adobe Acrobat it's the gold standard for documents we use it in all federal and state court filings they've invited the PDF and frankly everybody has used PDF in their lifetimes because of the free reader that's available right now the current versions for that DC and reader DC Reader is free so right the bottom here I have this little um this link and actually the materials the link will be active but you can also get this on my blog is Acrobat 101 for attorneys and I think that's actually resources for small businesses I think it's in there it may also be in the link on the East signatures I think it is but that's just going to talk a lot about the really powerful things that adobe can do for attorneys that really is underutilized by a lot of attorneys and I think Adobe Acrobat is one of the killer apps and probably the single most you software program in our firm besides word and maybe the browser so let's talk about the features of Acrobat to pay one and then Acrobat to free one so you can view print you can even sign DC in as many as you want but you can send to a month and chat about that in a second you can annotate PDFs you can search videos here's the differences though you can't create PDFs without Acrobat you can't edit PDFs you can't convert it to word you can't combine you can't compare forms this is a big one for attorneys so in the old day we used to get word forms and we would compare them using the comparison of the review tool well if you've been using Acrobat like me for the last 15-20 years the problem with with with sharing documents in Word is people don't want to give away their their forms and so they got to put it into PDF well how do I compare a PDF to a word document or another PDF well this DC just came out with the comparison feature where you can actually say I want to look at this this document versus this document and it'll do what word you still does but you can also protect PDFs and put some safety features security features into which can be super again important as part of that ethical obligation so I use Acrobat DC I think I paid 15 bucks a month for it's on a subscription plan I think you can buy it for a couple hundred bucks but the way I figured it is if I bought it and then in three years I think is when you reach that pick cost you just get a new one it's kind of like do you lease a car or do you buy the car and it's just a matter of whether you want to stay up with the latest technology or drive the old Honda from 2010 so so that we're gonna move on to picking a platform we need to pick a Nissan platform which one do we choose there's four factors that we really want to take a look at the first is the amount of monthly documents you use so if if you're an attorney you're only gonna send out two for signature a month you know god bless you I hope you have a way to make other money other than that but it doesn't sound like that's a lot I mean we send quite a few documents every week and we would be well behind the two on the free so you do want to focus on that a lot of the free plans on these platforms are five documents a month so again not anywhere near acceptable at our firm even for one attorney so we're looking for unlimited which believe it or not it goes from 5 to 2 unlimited like infinity so it's sort of you just have to pay to open that door secondly whose number of users so when we look at a doctor platform am I going to be using it is my staff member who hopefully is watching this program read this material that is going to prepare my contracts for signature are they going to be using it as well as me are other attorneys in my office I have four attorneys in my office and two paralegals all of us use this platform so we needed not six but we needed we needed more than say three or four and so the selection we chose was ever sign it gives us five users with unlimited monthly documents when you get to cost as a small solo I say solo I like to think like a solo or longer solo with four lawyers I'm still cheap because I like to deliver efficiently to my clients and trim costs because you don't make money spending it on excessive outside expenses because they had to you know one of the things we look at with Acrobat Acrobat is I think it's the $40 a month and for one user and ever sign is $40 a month for five users and both have unlimited but you've got one versus five very similar when we look at that's one of the first in the game millions and millions of people use it there's a name factor just as there is with Acrobat so if that name factor is important to you then you pay a little bit more and you just suck it up it's I don't think it's a class that I can really pass through my clients and that's just a cost and doing business so I'm gonna keep it low and then and then you really want to look at user reviews and ease of use because again unless you're really like hyper technical or technologically savvy you want something that's just simply used you don't want to be confused by it I always tell people even people literally scared to use new technology is like you can't break your computer you can't break the web they're out there to use you you know you might get frustrated you might have to have somebody show you how to do it which is one of the reasons why we do this program but you really shouldn't let that fear stop you from doing this you should just jump in you can't break it again there are several platforms that give you a free account we normally when I when I find new technology and there's a couple software programs we use for litigation but I know that it's really good when it's got a 30-day free trial and I I i buy it within a week I bought the ever sign platform within a week because I realized it's powerful potential for my firm and so again you know I found that it was easy to use my my staff was sort of you know a couple of them were great about adoption one or two was lazy until they realized how easy it was and now our firm is fully adopted it so you want to look at these up here some comparisons it's a lot of information here I don't want to go through too much of it except for down here on monthly Doc's five a month five a month 150 thirty dollars in Adobe sign there is thirty dollars but it's only one user here professional is five users so you can kind of there's a lot of information here $40 a month with gives you three users so two less than this and $10 more so you can kind of see these there's many out here and these are all based on annual subscriptions versus monthly if you're not sure the level of adoption sign up monthly or frankly use the free then tribe monthly and then if you like it really yearly because it's cheaper so why do we use these sign platforms a new way Spence why don't I just email them a encrypted Adobe document with the city you know with weather certificate or something I can just do between me and the client the reason you're doing it is because of the audit trail and the proper party so I say more binding because again if I send an email to my client and say hey here's a Word document could you just mark X sign it and send it back to me as a Word document that's binding and it's no less binding than something signed on ever sign it's just that if it's challenged we have an audit trail now and the audit trail basically says it was sent by me from this email on this date - Jo client at this email address who opened it at this time and this date who signed it at this time this date and then it was returned to me for my clients signature and so on and so forth so we call that the audit trail when you go to court you know as a litigator that audit trail is going to be really important to proving the the signatures and the intentionality of the adoption of the signature by the parties so the next thing you're gonna do once you pick your platform you're going to test and understand it and figure it out so this is just an acrobat introduction I'm not going to make recommendations you know the bar association doesn't like me to get too excited about one program or another so I've given you two today I'm going to give you ever sign up for that but again you kind of have to look around and poke around and see what's best for your firm so when you do this you go into Acrobat you use fill and sign and you say well I'm going to fill sign it or I'm gonna request signatures so this is kind of an interesting thing and then once you say request signatures you get started so you sign it recipients open it the link and then that you get notified when it signs and then here's where you would do it is you sending your signers right here and then in number four once you enter your signers name you go up here and you're gonna fill it out and prepare for signature this is just a really quick rudimentary document set for Adobe because I'm gonna focus much more detail with ever sign in a minute and here we know it's been sent so why is this important this is important because the successfully sent for signature is part of that audit trail which you'll get at the end of it and so you need to know the sending and receiving and that becomes important almost every electronic platform follows these rules and yes ever sign does allow you to order the document we had a client that guy we did get we did get an issue with that and one of my clients was very old-school you see a lot more sign so I get their ink and I think I was like okay Joe client will make that happen for you and we did and we put it in ordering and it doesn't get emailed to them until it's been fully signed by the other people in the order so it's pretty good yeah so the somebody had mentioned about the governors who ordered the emergency order I there's an electronic right to sign but I still don't believe that it authorizes electronic signing of wills and testimony instruments again I think the electronic signatures that they're talking about in the emergency order apply to other documents and the reason why I believe that is because with the notary Act coming into play in October of 2020 the they still don't allow wills even with electronic signing of notaries and the documents that the notaries will be witnessing to completely electronic transaction but it still does not allow remote electronic signed wills and Testaments treaments or other certain family documents or whatever I guess property settlement agreements I don't do family law it's not my cup of tea but so that would be I guess and again to err we err on the side of caution always his attorneys we're insurance for our clients not a problem for them and so we want to be more cautious and I would certainly think to be cautious in that way so let's understand reassignment and delegation so one of the things you may have picked up on is it's really and you actually will pick up on it when you start doing this is if I send a document for signature to opposing counsel and I say Joe have your client sign this the audit trail says I sent it to Joe Council not Jane client and now I've got a problem because does Joe you know just does the attorney open it up and sign it you know he can't he has to send it on to the next person to sign and so we really have this this problem it doesn't work if it's sent Solio opposing counsel like we might have with a settlement agreement and then he forwards it on and does things so we've got two problems one is you need the audit trail you need not opposing counsel to sign but his client sign and to us I'm not allowed to communicate with party represented by counsel so what's the solution ever sign uses a reassigned feature uses manager and from what we can tell through our limited research on this these reassigned features are standard for just about every Isan platform I will tell you that I reached out to ever sign and I was concerned about this issue because I didn't know about the reassign feature because I was sending it to somebody and I didn't realize you could reassign it on the receiving side and when I contact a customer service they're like yeah we don't have that ability and then as I was preparing for this program and really looking at both sides of the transaction I realized that they do in fact have a reassigned signature is a little different they actually you actually say the printer receiver is actually a manager and so you assign them not as a signer but as a manager I think that's how that works with jockeys fine but again effectively the same thing person who gets it says this needs to go to this email for this client to sign and it just yet goes to step process so without further ado what everybody has probably come for I am gonna start a live demonstration of a sign era I've ever signed there's the website it's it's pretty easy I'm gonna log in here and so the first thing I want to point out to you and this is a sort of a new thing with all these apps that are floating around nowadays whether it's slack or teams or may not know about teams but you can move through a forum program SurveyMonkey is you can brand the surveys or you can brand the product so you have to upload your logo and you have to upload certain information but once you do that that brand that we have and brand is very important to us because it's fundamentally our identity and the quality that we're delivering but it allows us to follow that brand identity not just in our own paper letterhead and whatnot but also now through ever sign which gives it an importer of trustworthiness with our clients and potentially the opposing counsel because then they're like okay I'm familiar with that so this looks legit and that's what really what you want is it's a trust issue so this is this is my dashboard and I'm gonna go to documents and what I'm gonna do okay so somebody asked if these documents I sign can be used for scheduled disbursements and releases in a final distribution and I I think so you know the the the wet signature requirement that you would have an orphans court is related to an essay in the probate area is related to the creation of the testimony arrangement and then the filings with the court there's no requirement that a private released between the parties be sort of per se filed with the court as as a motion or a verification so I think you'd probably be safe doing that because again when they come and they say well I didn't release you I'm gonna sue you you can present this waiver that they signed as a contractor with you outside of court as it were so I wouldn't be as reluctant to use a signing for waivers within the orphans court arena but but provided that there really a separate document from those proceedings which which I believe waivers are if you are required to file it and oftentimes orphans courts will require you if you think about it and and this has broad applicability because you want to think about it in general working your users but orphans court requires what signatures for everything so if you if they have a concern about a claim that's been made by a beneficiary and you have to satisfy that by submitting a release of claim they may reject it if the release of claim is not wet ink because every filing has to be wet ink with that said you know a relief of claim worst-case-scenario give you signs you file it they bounce it you go back to the client you say you got to sign this but I guess the worst case is you've already distributed and they won't they won't sign and I think you have to be careful with that but I think I would be more inclined to have a nice time than less so let me show you what this is so this is our screen where we create a document and you're gonna see I'm gonna sign it only maybe I'm signing something that somebody sent me I'm gonna have me another sign this might be the engagement letter or the other sign this might be the lease agreement or amendment or settlement agreement so so without further ado let me go ahead and bring up a document it's going to be this is going to be a consultant agreement between me and Bill Hall bill is the technological guru for the State Bar and he is running our show today in the background and thank you Bill and Shelly and Andrew or Angela well it looks like Angela and Andrea who are our core group of helpers here today so I have created a document for Bill and let me figure out where that is and I had it this morning and now it seems to be on air as where's this okay so I want to show you this is actually an interesting I'm going to show you real fast the use of Word and Acrobat the integration because I think you know like I like to try out quick tap tips here is a quick detective so we we can create PDFs by scanning or we can do this you can go over here to print save as PDF you can click save as and then when you click on that or you it'll give you an option to save as PDF or you can do what I did which is go up here to my customize quick access and there's more commands I'm just going to show you this real quick you have to go with all commands and I don't put this in my materials but inside of all commands is publish to PDF and when you get down to it you add it over to here and you just click add and it puts it up at this top level screen and I use this for all the things there's a save as which we use a lot instead of just save so I have to go find how do I print this to PDF so I publish the PDF up here this little button I click it now that it's up there and click publish and it's public so super easy super quick and everybody should have that at the top of their their little customized commands click access command toolbar it's a nice little trick ok let's go to this build all contract and figure out where this thing is desktop and get rid of all that garbage so I'm going to show you another thing here go to my desktop right here here's the bill Hall contract so there's two ways you can choose files and you can you can do it the old way which is going up here and then scrolling through and finding your bill hall contract or the way that I prefer is to actually find it in your file explorer so when you notice I found it by typing in Bill Hall contract right there and then I could search so then what I do is I just drop it right in there so again what we're doing is we pick me and others we then drop our file in here and then I can look at it yet that looks like the one I need so I dropped it in there a couple things about this you'll notice I don't have dates on here we're gonna put dates on here but because they don't actually need to fill it out I don't think it's necessary to even put dates on there anymore because it's gonna be automatic so designers are going to be me in Bill Hall so I'm down here now in designers and CCS and once I enter his information it's automatically remembered by ever sign in his address book because I have the state's contact check marked now here's the kicker we talked about that security and that language that said other security features surrounding the transaction so I'm gonna give Bill Hall who's watching right now a one two three four pen so it's now locked and he has to have that pin to unlock it so if bill has a kid who gets on his computer and starts to play around with it and clicks on the email and accidentally he can't sign it because it's locked in fact he can't even review it don't think so yes if somebody asks about you signatures well I'll come back to those liability issues on should they be enforceable and are they safe there are they usable so document title here if I don't put anything in here it actually is going to put the name of the document in and I like that because they can see my document and then I can put an email in here or I have had my own you know that I just just kind of a basic one here is that contract we discussed yeah down here enable auto reminders and require all signers to sign it so it's not like an optional thing you can check that off and say now I want to show you another thing you can see R it says CC so I'm gonna put in here Garrett that's my partner and I'm gonna not make him a signer but it's you see so Garrett will be will get notice that I've sent it out he'll get notice that it's signed oh get noticed that billing that bills open it that they'll signed it and he'll get the final document so I just put him in the CC so normally I use this when when I'm collaborating with one of my team members to get a document signed usually assigned a staff member on my files and so we usually will CC down so once that's done you kind of go through here and sort of see these basic things and it's pretty easy so far you go back here and you've got your document now you need to prepare it don't send quick send because it doesn't have signatures yet if you click that it will say you want signatures and you say yes go back you don't need to save a draft that kids kind of goofy because then you got to go over here documents drafts and find it again we click prepare but before you click prepare make sure everything he's done that's what we found is the most helpful so I click prepare and now here's my document and so bill doesn't know this yet but he's get my service agreement for the video he's got to read the small print which is so small it's invisible but he doesn't mind because he's a good support whoops and he's gonna sign it anyways so what I've done there is I've clicked on these two things up here and one of the signers and then I've put the signature block right here it recommends that you don't change the size of the initials or the signatures this one feel that it doesn't recommend changing so I also need him to initial this so that's gonna go down there on the bottom right-hand side of the page right there initials now the other thing I want to do is once he signs it he doesn't have to complete this it'll automatically be completed but I can also put the date signed up here so fiying this blank day of blank is no longer now it's this document signed on because this is going to complete that there's not a bunch of fields and we actually had to modify our normal legal documents the settlement agreements for instance that had the blank day of blank we now put signed on blank just to accommodate now because it's just one day this date will be posted by whoever signs that color so right now it's my color but I wanna build this on it because I'm gonna she's gonna sign it second I'm gonna sign it I'm gonna sign it right now while we talk so you notice when I grab this here it's still blue so I go up here to the float there's two ways to deal with that you can assign there's no sign I don't know I should say me I'm gonna click on this color which is me just kind of I used to see and and this is one of the goofy things is I can't if I wanted to add like to change this signature I find that it's hard to just click back and forth up here without just dropping it in and then clicking it so if that made sense but like if I click let me just remove this so if I'm doing bill and I click on that well it doesn't work now what this is doing is this is now telling me how to sign it and there's four options I can this is my uploaded signature here's the pretty signature and and you just pick one I say I like that one it's pretty you can also type your signature I can say I'm Spence the tech guy we draw a lawyer and you can also draw your signature here if you have a pen and a tablet it's even easier or you can upload and that's how we got that uploaded signature this one right here it was actually not drawn but I'm going to do this and I'm going to sign it and that's how you sign of course my documents particularly the important ones with the court date signed drop that right there and I'm going to initial it and I'm gonna sign that so that's automatically gonna do that now it's done so what I'm gonna do we're gonna we're gonna actually send it out and we're gonna have Bill sign it now he needs to sign here and he needs to initial here so what we're going to do is I'm gonna send this and telling you what's going on with it so I signed it on this date it was sent on this date and then at CC this gentleman and these are going to become important again with our audit trail so at this point what we're going to do is we're going to turn over that a screen to Bill Hall who is now going to check his email and bring it up okay so what Bill is going to do is Bill's not going to click on anything you tell they tell them to you because I want to walk you through some stuff and he knows this can we practice this bill if you could do me a favor scroll up for a second to the very top of your email so the first thing I want to point out to you is that it's sent by my name but it has this delivery and this is a very common sort of spam virus thing where you'll see an email and this is almost the giveaway it's it's a virus is it actually has a different sort of name it says John Doe and then it's Jimmy Fallon at cbs.com or something and you know it's you know it's a spam from some code sort of goofed up email so that's the first thing in some software may treat that as spam we find a lot of times that people get these emails and they delete on this fan we we have to remind them not to delete them we'll talk about that in a minute so if you can go ahead and go down and go ahead and you see it says it's been requested and here's my language of here's the contract he can view the status or he can review and sign and go ahead and read you inside and this is what your clients going to get in a general situation remember our security so bill should be the only one with that security pan he's gonna put in one two three four which by the way is not his pen that i use with my clients but and he goes could confirm pen and now it's going to bring you to the page and you see when we talked earlier i told you that it was going to autofill the date you can see I signed it on May 18th Adam Spence the trial lawyer so now it's Bill's turn to sign so he has a couple of things bill if you could click on actions for me I want to show the reassignment feature so go ahead and click reassign right there so don't don't click reassign but so what happens here is so I've sent this to Bill Vol and let's just pretend like Bill Hall is actually not signing or maybe this is until all that got received it may be this is attorney attorney Joe so now he's gonna put in bill halls name and Bill Halsey mail and he's gonna say hey here's that document that the opposing counsel sent you need to sign this bill so bill would just put that in click reassign and it goes and so you the really important part about this is you do not cannot forward the email it just doesn't work it has to go through this reassignment process inside of the website because if it doesn't there would be no there'd be no audit trail it has to be reassigned so that the audit trail exists because if he forwards it it's just not gonna work I've never tried it but it's not gonna work because I know the way the audit trails work and they work by email so you're gonna click cancel on that though and now what he's going to do is and by the way you can't break this right so you you know say you're an attorney and you click start instead of reassigns to click start and you're like wait a minute I'm not gonna sign this I need to go back to actions and click actions for me and you can still reassign as the attorney so go ahead and click click acts on that and then click next step so you can read it and you want to encourage them to read it and click Next steps there that big horns button which is convenient because it matches the colors of our brand so click next step on the right ok and then click on sign ok so he just clicked on sign and he's gonna pick his signature that he likes okay and at this point is just gonna sign it and you'll notice the dates the dates has occurred and now go ahead and click on the initials and initially it we're almost done folks I know that's right over a little bit but this is important stuff and you click finish now this is when we talk about this consumer disclosure this is where you're gonna see consumer disclosure do not sign it if you don't agree with it contact the sender and then it says by agreeing you agree to be legally bad and then that's where you go into the terms and conditions which is going to include all those disclosures and you click I agree okay now we had this this happened before where this happened but what we found bill if you can go back to your email and we're not sure why we're getting this this bug on this but now bill is already signed it and we're not sure we're ever getting that error message we got that error message with them last time my clients don't get that error message but bill for some reason that this does and it may be because he's Apple and so if you can go ahead this is the email that bill got after he signed the document this email will also be emailed to me saying the same thing and will be CC to Garret saying the same thing go ahead and click on the view document bill and again protecting the identity in the privacy and so now it brings you to this and so Bill's going in there and he's going to say download document and when hands up bill if you can go ahead and open up that document okay so you remember we put the date up there that's now inserted Bill's signatures inserted with his dates both dates are on there both signatures are there and Bill's go over the second page if that comes with it okay that does not what it does do though is it gives you a hash tag from ever sign at the bottom an