eSignature Legality for Contract for Work

How to eSign a document: eSignature legality for Contract for work

delighted you can join us for this one in this demo we're going to show you how we can automate the creation of a legal document pulling data from companies house using eSignatures and also getting user input let's Dive In before we get to a quote often you know we want to protect our IP and our information and obviously the client wants to protect information or Prospect protect information they're going to give to us so we start with an MDA or a confidentiality agreement now as you can see the person in the picture here signing it by pen we certainly won't be doing that today we'll be looking more at eSignatures but then before we go to the automated approach I'm going to take you through the approach I take now and then you can explain to me how we get whiz that all up that's okay good okay so the NDA Journey typically I start with a template now we've published our templates into Microsoft Word and what that means is I can start from the right place so if I just show you my Microsoft Word here you can see that the templates have come through now these templates are stored in SharePoint but the fact about these templates is I still need to go and complete them by hand afterwards so let me just move that out of the way and then once I've got my template the first thing I'm going to do is put my counterparty details in that typically means for me based in the UK going to companies house pulling that information from companies house which has a list of you know the company number the registered address and popping that into that template using a bit of custom paste and then changing the formatting so the fonts match and that kind of thing once I've got that I then add my purpose to my NDA why am I sending this NDA is it the supplier um are we customer is it something else so we're going to put that in there as well and mine sits halfway down in the document so I have to remember to scroll down and find a right paragraph and make that change and nine times out of ten I'm fine but it's at one time out of 10 when sometimes maybe I miss it because I'm in a rush then we send the signature if you use in the past Adobe Echo sign as well so there's various tools out there to send for Signature we're going down the digital route and then finally when it comes back to me typically in my inbox then I'm going to take that file and drop it back into SharePoint and that's how I do it then so is there a better way yes there is let's have a look at it and so everybody do you want to fire up your demo envira please yeah and I'm just going to dive into the home page first sir yeah so I think you know people have seen previous webinars we're not going to spend too much time talking about intranets but but the first thing we just want to highlight is that you know really the first place that we're coming to is our landing page for what we're doing in the organization so we've got things like our links to our standard tools and then the other key part of it of course is that it's got that consistent navigation that takes us into the various different work areas that we might be working on whether it's a policy tab if it's a departmental hub or an archives today we're going to focus on the clients area where we will store all of the sort of contractual and Commercial aspects of the clients that we work with so let's just go into the clients area and what we can see is just a small set of demo clients that we're working on and we've got some summary information here we've got a folder for each client but then we've got a few bits of additional information such as what is the relationship have we got a direct relationship with this person are we going via an established partner for instance and what kind of sector are they working and it's useful when we're sort of reviewing back over different proposals we might have created the concept that we're using here is something called document sets they are effectively folders that allow you to store additional information or metadata on them and all of that metadata can then inherit into all of the documents within them now for the purposes of of this webinar what we're about to show you we do need a real company to use because we're going to look up someone's company's house details based on a real company now fortunately one of our attendees has very kindly volunteered to let us use their company name so thank you very much for that Kim so we're going to use you as a sort of fictitious client here but just because you need a real company to use so Rupert let's just go and create a new document set for our new client here just like to say this information with political science is all public there's nothing secret here no that's right yeah so so we're going to put the client's name in so yeah it's a company's called law 365. good stuff yeah what sector they're in legal and we'll have a direct relationship with them for this purpose okay uh give that a minute so we've filled in a few basic bits of information in here and that's created this folder area with the right details filled in now what we need to do is take us through that next step of setting up an NDA so we're just going to jump back a level on the in the hierarchy here so you may have seen again looking at this these don't look like the normal sort of folders that you've used and as I said it's I've kind of you mentioned this concept of a document set the key thing being as I go and set values on the document set itself such as legal direct and what we'll see shortly is as we go and populate with the company information all of that will inherit into all of those documents within that folder so that that can be easily reused and support the process of generating our further documents so Rupert we're going to do this first step of looking up the company details from company's house so let's just go and do that quickly so if we go and automate this please we've got a few power automate steps in here so you know we're kicking off all of these manually normally these would be sort of chained in a proper sequence but for the purpose of a demo it kind of makes it a bit easier for for us to move things on so we're going to do this one here look up company's house now the thing that we do need to know is what the company number is the reg number now quite often you'll find in people's email signatures if you're starting that conversation they might have in their sort of disclaimer in their standard email signature block you know the registered number of that particular company and this is quite useful for those scenarios where they might be operating under a trading as name as opposed to their official legal name so let's just go and paste that we've got that saved yeah we go right we're off so there's a few little steps that are happening in the background so I think while we'd wait for that it sometimes happens really quickly but but it takes a few seconds let's just refresh that and see if that's coming through and there we go marvelous so Ben we pulled back some information here from a third-party data service obviously company's house is open and accessible could this come from other systems within a client's I.T infrastructure yeah absolutely so for the for the techies in the room we're using power automate and a bit of something called Azure logic apps to make those calls out to external services so companies house provide a service this could be looking up perhaps a a CRM system that you have or you know it could be looking up some other referential data that's that's available you know making a call based on a single value that we pass in which is that company number and then getting much more information that we can pass back and then reference as we start generating our documents so you can see here the address the company number the officials limited company name has all come through the jurisdiction Etc I think that's you know helpful because often you know sales people are lazy they put that in that's not legally recognized and I think the other thing which you know obviously we know about this house but Ben am I right in saying it doesn't have to be on the Microsoft stack where this information is it they have what we call a rest API we can get that data yeah exactly yeah that's right that's pretty cool okay should we create an MBA so yes we've got the information that's going to support that part of the process and the next step is we're going to kick this off and create an NDA again typically this might be something that you would sort of string together but for the purpose of the demo so we're going to kick off that option create NDA here and what we'll see in a second is we've got some options of what our permitted purposes are going to be so in the case of an NDA depending on what your relationship with that organization is as Rupert said you may be providing Services you may be receiving services or it may have some other kind of obligation like you know such as your accountant for the purpose of this demo this sort of hypothetical scenario we're just going to put in IT services for the moment and we'll see how that gets cross-reference a bit later on so again you know these are all live demos they're typically pretty quick they can take a few seconds sometimes so why don't we click inside that folder and see if that's been generated already no not yet so we'll do a quick refresh there we go so we didn't have to wait too long for that so we can see that the document has been generated and we can see as I highlighted earlier looking at that document that metadata from the parent document set has been set on the document as well which can support other you know additional things we need to do let's take a look inside the document we put okay so as we look inside this we can see that the various bits of information that we needed you know the things like the company name as pulled from the document set all of that information has been injected into the document the agreement date the counterparty details which is the thing that as we said normally you're going to go and have to go and manually look up and enter in in the right formatting in the right way you know all of that information has been passed through automatically as part of the the document generation tool okay again let's have a look a bit further down we can look at limited purpose so as we go in here we can see that this permitted purpose is completely seamless you know the fact that historically what we might have had to do is have three different paragraphs and we remember to edit it we might have it highlighted in yellow to remind ourselves to update it that has just been seamlessly injected based on you know we selected IT services and therefore the right statement has been injected as a result perfect that's pretty cool so typically off the back of generating an NDA like this because the next step really is to go and submit it for signature isn't it yeah some organizations like to see a word version first before signing as I was saying well if it's mutual let's just crack on so let's just crack on sounds good to me so yeah let's go and fire up the automate option again don't say baby we've got a model of workflows and one free signature I'm guessing this eSignature workflow could apply to any kind of document whether it's a contract maybe an HR document or in this case our NDA absolutely yeah exactly okay now normally when I'm sending out an indicator signing there's obviously two parties involved for the sake of Simplicity and to keep the demo moving forwards we're just going to use one party and we're going to use Megan who is the person actually in the context I'm running today so that means you get to see the whole process of the document being sent but you also get to see the signing process as well so Ben I'm guessing so every time that scenes are some cogswearing here yeah absolutely I mean so far we've been quite lucky because these things have all been running pretty quickly why don't we see and in fact that looks um yeah let's give it a minute it's running shouldn't take too long but there we go should get another one through a few seconds give that a quick refresh I know it does hold automatically and we'll give that a second to go there we go there we go yes we didn't have to wait too long for that so so the the eSignature tool that we're using is a tool called connective obviously the Fairly standard tool is a Adobe sign they will then generate their appropriate email that invites someone into the document to go and sign it so we can see we've come into the signing interface here we can scan through all of that information that has been dynamically generated and put into the document is visible the right purpose is in there etc etc so we're going to scroll down to the bottom where we see that signature block here okay so we're going to be prompted to sign now again with these electronic signature tools normally they want you to acknowledge that you accept to use electronic signatures as your mechanism so we're going to start signing and again different tools have different options and we can configure this we're just doing a manual one because it looks pretty in a demo I would say there's mag that's a very nice signature repurpose stuff out of a map yeah indeed it looked like you're a right-handed person right and left-handed maybe good stuff just we'd use connective I mean we've looked at various tools with lots of we've looked at Adobe sign I think and what we've seen is there's a balance of you know the cleanliness of a user interface almost related to pricing so I've you know our personal take is other products might have a Slicker user interface but you will pay the premium for that so that's the balance it you have to reach yeah yeah exactly okay so that's now signed and finished we've got that so I'm going to shut that down and we just go back to your email you should see yeah so we've had a little notification that's just come through yeah so that one's just finished as well we've also sent a yeah so that's the email that comes through from the signature tool itself so again if this is something that you've signed sent to a recipient They will receive that email so they can go and download that signed copy and save for their records now the other thing that we've done here as part of our process we've sent that notification to the person that originated it now obviously because this is a demo it's possible to make these emails look a bit prettier a little bit more information into them this is just a quick summary statement there's obviously flexibility to construct the email that's appropriate but a good example of this would be perhaps the legal counsel has sorted out getting the NDA signed for the next stage of the process is to notify the account manager so that they can then go through and start generating the quotes and doing the work that they need to do so let's just jump back into the SharePoint a minute and let's see what's have happened so again of course that document the pdf version has been saved automatically retrieved and put alongside so we've got the working version and then the signed official copy and this digital signature block has been inserted into the document here if you were to open that up in a tool such as Adobe Acrobat you would see that digital signature and its certificate that shows it hasn't been tampered with Etc okay that's good news I know let's just summarize what we've seen there so there's a few takeaways of things that you can do if you're not ready to go down the whole automation route the first thing is and you saw that on my word document is to publish those templates into SharePoint and what and so they can be exposed in word and PowerPoint at least that way you're working a single version of the truth rather than saying to me until desktop the second thing that you can do is we Ben talks a lot about document sets rather than using folders and that what that means is you're going to persist that metadata so you need to put that data sits in one place it's going to appear against all of the documents and folders within that document set so that's certainly worth looking at as well and then the third piece is look we showed connective one ethernet tool Adobe sign is Microsoft's official partner for free signatures you do need the Enterprise version rather than a business version if you're going to do this and they have a transaction based pricing model which starts at a three pounds 12 RRP for I think from one transaction and goes down to one pound data transaction if you're looking at a few thousand so there's various pricing models there I know some tools charge for Signature some per transaction or envelope so there's also balances there to see which might be the best tool for you I think the key things that we liked about Adobe sign and also connective is that you don't need a premium connector is that right Ben I will actually Adobe sign you don't need one more connective you do so we we have to work around that yeah so we're going to go to a different tool yeah but therefore another benefit of adobe sign so there you go that's a wrap we've automated some processes in SharePoint and power automate I hope you found it useful looking forward to seeing you back for the next video