Ensuring the Lawful Use of Electronic Signatures for Administration in Australia

How to eSign a document: electronic signature lawfulness for Administration in Australia

[Music] welcome to the top-notch legal bulletin today we're going to talk about electronic signatures and our fast-paced world of business we're quickly becoming a paperless society and electronic signatures are going to become more and more common and more and more important now there's a difference between electronic and digital signatures which I'm not going to go into today rather what I want to talk about is the authority that stands behind a signature this was highlighted in a recent case involving Williams and idh modular now Williams was in the business of supplying building materials and idh modular wanted to buy some on credit so idh modular filled out a credit application and this was backed up by personal guarantees from the directors all of those personal guarantees was signed electronically idh modular then purchased nine hundred thousand dollars worth of building surprise and shortly thereafter went into liquidation so william ii tried to enforce the personal guarantees against the directors and one of them mr. crocker objected saying that he shouldn't be liable under the guarantee because he'd know nothing about it and he didn't authorize his signature to be put on the document williams argued that there was nothing at all to alert them that there was anything wrong with these signatures and of course that the guarantee should be upheld but court said no there had been a system within idh modular where they had a software program that listed all the contracts that the directors signatures had been applied to and this guarantee didn't show up so the court was satisfied that Crocker had no knowledge and certainly hadn't given his consent to the guarantee and so it was not enforced to be able to Crocker so the message here is that you really need to check the authority behind the signature whether it's electronic or whether it's on a piece of paper the person who signs will not bind the entity or the company behind them unless they have the appropriate authority and quite often this is an apparent authority but what I would recommend is that if you're not sure get an email confirmation that the person who's signing does have the right Authority a top-notch legal we say wisdom is the principal thing so get wisdom listen to what we're saying today so that's all for now from top-notch legal we take care of business