eSignature Legitimacy for Business Agreements in United States

How to eSign a document: e-signature legitimacy for Business agreements in United States

good day my name is Steven Davids and in this video I will discuss e signatures and more specifically fre alternatives to them but let me start off with a disclaimer Nam this is a general guideline so if you want to implement it please contact your legal advisor maybe there are things that are very specific to your area or to your circumstances which you must consider I will touch on four elements namely free systems in general then we will look at the South African legal requirements for E signatures then the general requirements and then we will focus on cost effective alternative namely an email system that complies with in my view the legal requirements and the general requirements if you search the internet for free electronic signatures then you will find a lot of systems that is free but on closer inspection you will see that they are very limited mostly sometimes to two or three email signatures per month and therea you must start paying or you have a trial period maybe of 30 days and there after you must pay so there are no real unlimited [Music] free signatures which I could get therefore I need a system that is free especially maybe for a small business person who set out and you are cash stressed first thing you want from your e signature is that it must comply with the legal requirements in your area in South Africa we have the electronic communication and transactions act number 25 of 2002 that recognizes two types of e signatures the first one is the advanced signature and these Advanced signatures you get them on the Internet and in fact they are emphas ized by companies that wants to sell the expensive products but then you also get a nonadvanced signature that is recognized by law and which is not emphasized so much by these companies that want to sell their products it is also important to know the the exclusions and what are not covered by the ACT exclusions from the ordinary electronic signatures or nonadvanced signatures are a s ship as well as signatures by a commissioner of oath these things cannot be signed by a ordinary signature and they can only be signed using an advanced electronic signature then there are elements and aspects that cannot be signed bya electronic signature at all and those are amongst others an agreement for sale of an immovable property land of course long-term leases of land that exceeds 20 years the signing of a w and Bill of exchange other than that everything else is covered by the ACT I must emphasize that you must consult your legal advisor but in general the requirements ing to the ACT are for an legally valid e signature is there must be mutual agreement on the the format that you will use the E signature must identify the sender the person writing it and signing the document it must identify his approval of the data other words he therefore also needs to open sometimes a file and not just click the data that is signed must be identified in other words is it a a sales contract or is it a agreement to provide something you must at least identify the time and the date when it was signed and then you must saw the documents for an appropriate period in our case is 3 years and of course there must be the ability to retrieve it should you need to defend and prove the signature in a court of law in our case we designed an email system of an e signature that in our view complies with the requirements of the law and also important which is free and truly unlimited for the purposes of this video I will use our learner contract as an example any contract must comply with all the legal requirements of the contract namely it must be entered into with a person who are legally able to sign it and to undertake this contract from AUM exec Tes Etc the first step is that there must be in the contract a clause we stipulate the nature of the electronic signature as well as that the parties agree to the format that will be used therea you create a girft email with the proper heading in this case for me the heading consisted of the topic the nature of the topic and this nature of the topic the topic I will then use later on to falter the incoming emails the fictitious data that I used further on is a surname the name ID number and then I also use an A and A B here in this case of the email which will be sent I used a I used the same topic and subject heading on the file I sent out to the person and the learner agreement then has the different extension name be so that if I file both documents as PDF it will appear the one after the other therea you have a proper subject and the subject basically says if you receive this email receive because had a learner agreement application do not apply then reply and then in your reply do not make changes to The Heading because this heading is important for the filing purposes do not add any other text because it is at the very end you only want to see not other business only the E signature password and then only put is the e sign password in your reply and this e e sign password is at the end of the contract because you stay your only reply to this email if you intend to digitally sign the document indicat your approval of the Lear agreement by copying the E signature password that you will find at the end of the castar agreement and then paste it in this reply to this email the reason why you have the E signature password in the attached email you want to ensure that you have proved that the person opened and read the document and that he must indicate his approval of the document that he read through at the end of your contract you insert your e signature password e signature password you can make it a strong POS and you request rather request the person to copy and paste it and then type it because it is a strong part and it makes you mess up and type accidentally wrong it is forth and back but he can type it also and as I pointed out the file of the agreement must be the same except that have a different extension when you file it which makes it easier to get we are now at step number c where you attach this contract file with its embedded e signature password to the email and you send it away but also remember to copy Bob call or your own organization so that you have a copy of everything and this includes the contract itself that is attached with his embedded password you will need it later on to prove that the password that a person sent was in fact the password in the email that was requested the email with the attached contract is then send off automatically via autocrat whenever the form is submitted you then go to Gmail and you then go to your Gmail account and create the label for the learner agreements and you can have an electronic learner agreement because you are busy now with electronic uh signage of the learner agreement but you can also make the provision for manual signage where it is not possible having these labels you also it's advisable then to have the forums shown because the forums will then also group up with the grouping of these uh email when it is coming in and when you format the electronic uh the labels I prefer to put in the color so I can easily see this is learner agreement electronic format that came in here in addition you will then need to apply and use a filter the filter will help you then to automatically label the incoming emails you manage the label and apply click on manage labels on the side menu then you go to the filters block filters you will a create a filter in this case the fter was already created I'll show you how it was edited and therefore can you see the subject here the subject heading is learner agreement e signature so whatever other elements coming in here maybe the individual Name ID number those things that differ but as long as the ID is here and therefore the request was that a person must not change the EC me it will be filtered continue and you also say label apply the label to incoming email as learner agreement and then categorize it as for forums you would not necessarily have to do this but I prefer it and at this moment in time you cannot create categories but deal with the cards that you have click then just update filters and there you have it there you have it there are only a few steps remaining namely step number I will save your incoming email and its attachments as a PDF in a separate folder I like to save it in a separate folder remember to save both the incoming email and the attachment because you must prove that the person pasted and read the document and pasted the password as requested after saving it on your hard drive has an additional security measure you can archive the incoming emails and the attachment store it for 3 years in our case and then regularly change the E signature password in the contract file so that it regularly updates and people have different e signature passwords in this video we have addressed the shortcomings of so-called free E signatures we paid attention to the legal and general requirements of an e signature in this African context and proposed an alternative thank you very much for watching this video we love constructive comments please like and share this video