Ensuring eSignature Lawfulness for Sales in United States

How to eSign a document: eSignature lawfulness for Sales in United States

[Music] hey what's up everybody june 30th is national e-sign day here in the u.s and it officially marks 22 years since former president bill clinton signed into law the electronic signatures in global and national commerce act so to commemorate this i'm wearing a stupid-ass panda suit so if you're only listening to this you're missing out on the visual experience because pandas love documents and use signatures um or at least i do because i'm from panadoc anyway we decided to do an episode a special episode where we're gonna debunk some myths on eSignatures and answer some questions about what it's like to sell into the legal field legal profession and um we'll also discuss just what technology in this industry means right uh bill clinton certainly had his own uh idea for what this would look like in the future and today with me to do that is reid anderson account executive at panama reid welcome to the show you're back again dude back at it thanks for having me right now man you're actually super excited you're the first person i've ever had on twice no way congrats okay [Laughter] i'm flattered big deal i've got an opening clip i want you to take a look at as we're talking about the perception of lawyers and new technology and software so let's take a look here and watch it together mr ponton i believe you have a filter turned on in the video settings you might want to uh uh we're trying to can you hear me judge i can hear you i think it's a filter it is and i don't know how to remove it i've got my assistant here she's trying to oh he's got his assistant there she's trying i'm prepared to go forward with it that's i'm here live that's not i'm not a cat i can i can see that i can't that's a real actual i believe hearing that was taking place at a district court in texas when a lot of stuff for lawyers was happening over zoom um so yeah let's talk about selling new technology to lawyers and legal teams i'm gonna pull back my panda um covering here so when i was getting ready for this episode um i was talking with a couple different people on your team and there was a little bit of a devil's advocate about trying to sell panadoc specifically but i have a feeling there are other horizontal business sas tools or folks who are trying to sell to lawyers and they struggle and so here is a quote i won't say who it's from to protect their identity because it's a little harsh but i'm eager to hear your response to it so it reads i won't bother going after legal teams anymore because their profession is founded upon getting paid for billable hours which means that the longer something takes the more money they make so they're not interested in a software like pandadoc or other softwares that speed up their job processes they want to move as slowly as possible what do you think about it wow yeah we're like a minute in and i'm already worried about a defamation lawsuit dude say goodbye to your dreams of going to law school man sorry mom ah you know what there's there's some truth to it i probably would have totally dismissed it before i was in sales selling just okay everybody needs systems that improve things but i have had some experiences where things were really being dragged along and a colleague of mine just put this on my radar for hey this might be happening at the end of the day i think it's just incentives yeah like humans respond to incentives so if you are incentivized to take a little bit longer not saying you're going to draw things out for a year months or even weeks but maybe uh push it out a couple days or another back and forth yeah i think as well it's it's good to note here that there are lots of different types of lawyers and legal teams that are using all sorts of different tools and not all of them are using billable hours there's a subset of attorneys that you know work in that kind of function and do it that way there are others who only make money if they win the case so yeah you could bet that they probably do want to save time so yeah i can understand the frustration i think there is some truth to that when you run into it but i i think you said it well man yeah um all right let's talk about your experience selling into um legal teams and lawyers who whether they want to or or don't want to invest in new technology what do you think are some of the biggest mistakes that companies make when they're trying to attract and maybe pitch lawyers probably the biggest one is just assuming that they have the same pain points are looking for the same value ads that your other personas are so for for where i'm at we sell a lot to sales and marketing and you know if i was selling cars like marketing right they want a car that looks really nice sales wants one that goes really fast uh legal sometimes they don't want those same things right they're gonna want in my experience something with a lot of control four-wheel drive and probably airbags like all around it because sales people are running wild and they need to keep them controlled and safe and right not expose themselves legally so i think just assuming you're going to be able to roll with the same marketing and attract the same uh or attract people for the same reasons yeah it's an obvious one but you know you need to talk to lawyers at the end of the day to get their feedback before you roll anything out like that because they will surprise you with their answers i think yeah i think that's great advice not assuming the same pitch the same messaging or pain points are gonna work in these two very different like if in sales and marketing and legal you better be ready man you better be ready have you ever successfully sold to a lawyer or legal team and what led them to buying with you yeah i do have a handful of successes under my my backwards cap so the most important thing for me was i made mistakes in the beginning and then learn from those the mistakes were almost always around trying to force something on a system that they really really liked and so something that they just were not going to let go of despite in my view as a salesperson it's going to save you time it's going to do all these other things and you might as well just call it out now it's redlining microsoft word in my experience you're going to have to basically pull word from their cold dead hands they're going to use this yep exactly so for me what i learned was just ignore don't ignore let them have microsoft word for the redlining and then try to uncover whether there were any value ads at the beginning of the process before the redlining and then after the redlining and if there are then just focusing on those not trying to you know cure cancer fix everything but just focus in on those areas and so the wins that i have had that's where we're most successful and i mean i even call out if depending on what they're looking for i'll call out you know we're not gonna touch word i'll be very clear about that because some people will react negatively and then it can kill your whole deal yeah so this guy doesn't know anything about my field he's not gonna be able to help me you know first i think that's great advice when you're trying whether you're listening to this you're not selling trying to sell panda doc but you're trying to sell to a lawyer don't try to solve every single problem with the tool the legal field has been around for a very very long time and they have a tradition and a set of standards for how they do things so when you're trying to successfully sell to them don't try to disrupt everything just try to help find those little gaps that there are and i i love that man that's a really good approach too because it's not overzealous i'm thinking of every lawyer i know yeah and they're like this guy's full of [ __ ] he's trying to solve everything for me he doesn't know anything and when you call it out too when you when you acknowledge hey we're not this is how we're going to handle the redlining process but fundamentally it's still going to be in word and you call that out and maybe splice a little joke in there they they totally get it and they're just like all right he knows what we're about he's not trying to take this away from us so let's focus on these other areas so it sounds like it's really helpful to get your reps in like practicing and figuring out you know whatever it is you're trying to sell to a legal team or lawyers you're gonna have to find out the hard way of what they're not gonna let go of and what the long rich tradition of you know their profession is gonna be cool with and not so one of the things that is like a you know common trope is that legal teams slow things down and they take forever right so if you're a seller and you're like i've got quota to hit it's the end of the month end of the quarter how the heck can i just like work with legal teams better to get this freaking thing signed already like this deal everybody's on board but legal's holding this up what tips do you have for this issue yeah two big ones especially like travis mentioned if you're on a monthly or quarterly quota and something's time sensitive one you're gonna have to do it earlier in the process so if it it could be too late to try to fix it this way but just try to get the redlining or the legal review all those documents that need to go back and forth between councils try to start that earlier in the process so what i used to do and i know what a lot of reps do is they'll vary point by point they'll do discovery they'll do demo confirm product fit security and then after all that's done exchange the msa and do the redlining what i try to do now is parallel path that with those other points so try to you're not going to be able to engage a legal team if you're in discovery because you're they haven't even acknowledged that you're the vendor and they don't want to waste time but at a certain point you will be able to do that alongside those other items that you have to check off and hopefully they align at the end and you're not you know stuck on the last day of the the month waiting for that msa yeah so are you sending what does your process usually look like after you've done discovery are you sending the msa along with the proposal is that are you bundling that stuff and you're like here's what it's going to cost like i don't know yeah yeah so i'll include it with the proposal with the pricing that i send over but even before that during discovery try to get an idea of when their legal team can be engaged confirm that they are going to want to redline it and have a review and then yeah send it over as early as possible try to multi-thread so if they don't know on their legal team who's involved just ask questions around that and just yeah try to get that started as early as possible basically so questions like all right um if you were to say yes to pandadoc or whatever you're selling um who needs to be involved uh is there anyone else maybe missing from this conversation who's going to want to sign off on the final dotted line or might need to be involved is that kind of like how you're approaching it yeah i'm more assumptive even i'm just and rightfully so because it's it's very very rare that they're not going to want to review so i just assume i'm like your legal team is going to want to look at rmsa do they typically do that after you guys have like finalized a list of two or three vendors or do they would they be open to just starting that right now so that we can be more productive up front and not delay the project timeline i also see that you're framing this in like the rfp request for proposal kind of like you know you're speaking it sounds like from like some enterprise experience where it's like a very official process of like trying to find a vendor and they've so um is there anything else that you think might speed up the process i think you said there were two things there were two yeah this other one would be when you're going through the red lines or just any kind of back and forth that's usually facilitated via email so you're kind of you're the the messenger the in-between in this they have their counsel you have yours and their counsel will put red lines on it your champ will email it to you then you pass it off to and it's just there's a lot of stops on the way to getting it fully reviewed so especially if you have a lot of if they have a lot of red lines that are uh just hard to hash out via email or or in microsoft word i'll schedule a zoom call get both legal teams on that call and they can just talk it out and i mean it really really speeds things up because there can be tiny little interpretations or word differences that are just take a lot longer to do via email and you know one email back and forth can delay things by a couple days because you don't know how busy they are with other documents yeah so it's sounds really simple but just get everyone on a zoom or a teams or some kind of video conference call and talk it out and i i think in my experience too we have great the great legal team over here but i think they're more open to coming to an agreement when they're actually talking to each other because they're not this amorphous person who they just know through microsoft word it's a face that they can see a person lawyers are people lawyers are people shout out yeah exactly and so they're just more open to all right let's let's deal with this we don't have to schedule another call do we so let's work it out yeah i love it what is one lesson you have painfully learned from selling to lawyers they're always going to want a redline especially especially if you're working up market enterprise deals you can get so far down you've negot pro you've got product fit done discovery security and you've even negotiated and then maybe you forgot to loop in legal and you think all right maybe this one's their team's not going to want to look at our m or they're going to think our master service agreement is perfect yeah maybe that's gonna happen and so you just kind of blind eye ignorance is bliss and you you don't do it and then inevitably they want to redline it and it can push things out weeks so yeah it can be devastating and um i mean another one lawyers go on vacation i i had no idea that they did but that killed they didn't kill it delayed i've had a couple deals delayed came down to the wire and boom yeah lawyers out for two weeks because they're in aruba or hawaii really dove they lawyers really love going to the caribbean man yeah unbelievable well reid that was awesome that really is helpful and i know i feel like i'm ready to go up market and try to start selling now i've got my no parallel paths i've got my um when to loop in folks and you know understanding that msas are always going to be redlined so just know that that's going to happen you'll probably have to lose the suit if you're you're on a zoom call but i was trying to man my man's on the zoom earlier who was dressed up as a cat um yeah for those that were just listening i don't know if i explained that but it was a zoom debacle where a guy accidentally had the cat filter turned on didn't know how to turn it off um all right let's let's switch gears let's go into the second section of this podcast [Music] it is national east sunday i'm wearing the stupid suit um let's debunk some e-sign myths because believe it or not we actually did a little bit of like a radio road show and um we had some some of our executives go and chat which is kind of like more like folks who maybe aren't as familiar with like electronic signatures and sas and documentations and there was there's still a lot of hesitation um from folks who don't understand how this technology works even though it came out 22 years ago um so let's start with the first myth and we can kind of clarify them together sure first one is electronic signatures and digital signatures are pretty much considered the same thing in the us false false false yeah and maybe not for the people who are less technically savvy and even including myself like because this kind of gets in the weeds but there is a difference between digital and electronic i i think people generally use the terms synonymously but there are some specific differences mainly having to do with the level of security and i think verification that's required a digital is a step above electronic gotcha okay that's helpful i did not know that all right number two all electronic signatures have the same legal legitimacy and it doesn't really matter which tool you use in the u.s false all right i'm just throwing this guy up for like slam dunks here man yeah well i guess true doesn't require an explanation right that's i'm catching on okay so false yeah there are just a lot of different laws and compliances that different industries have that depending on the industry and who you're selling to where the data is stored all of those things factor in into whether a document that you send specifically would be binding so yeah whether healthcare is a good example okay you need hipaa compliance because you're going to have patient information potentially on documents so not all e-signs are hippa compliant panadoc wasn't hippa compliant before covet hit for the pandemic it took us about a month after because there was so much demand and we achieved that and threw a big party because it was a big deal but yeah hipaa there's ferpa that's more in the edu space for children okay yeah education and uh sock two type two okay that's a big one so i i kind of judge the importance of things based on how big a party we threw after we achieved them and sock 2 type 2 it was a very fun time san francisco back then yeah it was it was huge yeah it was enormous and i had no idea what it was back then but yeah it warranted a big celebration so yeah you have to do your research at the end of the day eSignature it's somewhat commoditized these days and there's just a lot of e-signs out there i'll get on calls today and people will say you know i ask them who else they're evaluating and they'll name drop companies that i've never heard of and i've been in this space for five and a half years yeah so you really got to do your research on there on your industry and on the actual software provider perfect well said man okay moving on to the next one electronic signatures and contracts do not carry the same weight of the law as a pen and paper signature in the u.s that is false yeah they do so again this is going to differ by industry so there might be some very niche industries or situations where they wouldn't be certainly in the in the us i believe it's almost every situation but i think there are other countries that maybe are if we want to say lagging behind or just not as technologically adept where they wouldn't be so if you are if you're just doing business in the us you probably don't have anything to worry about but all you know i've calls with countries all over the world and they have different laws and their jurisdictions so again it's just something you always got to let people know you got to research this don't don't assume because we know what happens when when you do that well i'll also put out a shout out to the marketing team we have a great list of different countries and different legalities um and state by state here in the u.s so you can check out our website just type in on google panadoc uh legal eSignatures state country something like that it'll pop up i promise all right so that actually brings us into the next one which is good highly regulated industries like legal finance healthcare and education cannot use electronic signatures because they require a paper trail in the u.s false all of these are false i'm just going to go ahead and say it but i want you to help explain it yeah you did a better job of it exactly i feel like i i even answered this one partially so yeah yeah but so they they require different compliance or sort of certifications compliance levels mainly having to do with the data okay so for education it's it's student data there's an extra layer of certification or things you have to do around that healthcare it's patient data and depending on the business some edu companies they need the the data centers where the data is stored to be in a specific location it's not okay if it's everything's just in the us so yeah again depending on the industry and honestly not it's not just the industry but it's sometimes the the level of risk that a specific organization security team their uh security team would be willing to take on so it's not all black and white there's shades of gray there people can interpret laws differently or risk differently interesting the only other one i could think of here to add on to what you said is um with the industry of legal um you know shout out panadoc notary if you haven't checked that out but i know that in a lot of legal scenarios you do need a notarization right in order to um make something you know binding in certain situations maybe it's a divorce maybe it's um you know a will and testament or something like that uh there are uh the vast majority of states in the u.s throughout kova did pass laws to allow for remote online notarization so you don't have to go in your car and drive to an appointment and sit down in front of some dummy who's going to just notarize something so ron there you go ron ron remote online organization so quick plug there and then yeah let's look at the last one businesses cannot trust electronic signatures and contracts because they're easily and forged before you answer this is false because we know it's false you would be surprised at the number of people who are still concerned about this exact issue like there are thousands if not millions of people who still think like well i don't want to do that because like i'm worried about getting i'd rather sign a pen and paper they can't come steal that from me so what do you have to say to that than debunking this myth yeah it's you know there maybe some people do i'm not going to totally dismiss people being work because yeah hey if it's cloud-based servers could go down or things could happen but what i always like to point out is it's not like the alternative is completely risk-free either people forge signatures uh you know in the name of someone else or so you're you're exposing yourself to risk you can lose a document either way oh exactly really easily right you're killing trees you're storing them in folder in physical folders it's so yeah at the end of the day you know it's uh you can do it the old-fashioned way but your business might fall behind well said all right um to wrap things up let's play this brief clip from that day 22 years ago um starting where bill clinton uh addresses for the electronic signature and global and national commerce act signing for this one online contracts will now have the same legal force as equivalent paper contracts companies will have the legal certainty they need to invest and expand in electronic commerce they'll be able not only to purchase products and services but to contract to do so and they could potentially save billions of dollars by sending and retaining monthly statements and other records in electronic form eventually vast warehouses of paper will be replaced by servers about the size of vcrs customers will soon enjoy a whole new universe of online services with the swipe of the smart card and the click of a mouse they'll be able to finalize mortgages sign insurance contracts or open brokerage accounts just as importantly the law affords consumers who contract online the very same kind of protections and records such as financial disclosures they currently receive when they sign paper contracts all right that's pretty good right there as i fall asleep listening to bill clinton um yeah i think uh it's kind of eerie that 22 years ago he predicted this and like it there are vast warehouses that amazon and google and all these other cloud servers now host all of our cloud storage on so here we are yeah i i wasn't even i didn't really know the history of this and actually a customer my customer of mine pointed out that just the history behind it clinton was the one who did it and i thought it was funny that i think initially they were thinking he'd be able to sign it electronically but of course it's not legal yet so i think he had to sign it by hand and then he signed it electronically i get a kick out of that it's like we had to sign the law physically yeah with a pen and paper to allow us to sign it digitally and now moving forward card before the horror situation avoided avoided reid thanks so much for coming onto the podcast debunking some e-sign myths with us and explaining how to better work and sell into legal teams we love having you on and i'm sure this will not be the last time my man it was a pleasure appreciate it all right everybody thanks so much for listening let us know what you think of the podcast feel free to reach out to read if you have more questions about debunking myths on eSignature or selling to legal teams and we'll catch you soon with another episode of the customer engagement lab thanks for listening to the customer engagement lab brought to you by pandadoc if you liked what you heard please subscribe to our youtube channel or connect with us on linkedin we love to hear from you and what you think of the show