eSignature Legality for Operations in Canada

How to eSign a document: eSignature legality for Operations in Canada

i'm nadia savaini i'm a director in our business law team and today i'm going to be talking to you about electronic signatures [Music] so before the pandemic we already had electronic signatures being widely used in our community we certainly had electronic conveyancing that was already on the scene but certainly the pandemic had the effect of changing our priorities from a wants based priority to a need-based priority suddenly we had people who were working from home and remotely and who still needed to finish their transactions but couldn't do so by going to see a witness or signing other than electronically [Music] electronic signature can come in many forms and is quite often misunderstood and compared to say signing something in pen and then emailing it to somebody else that's not quite electronic signature that is still a method of completing a transaction electronically and that's been widely available now for quite some time but electronic signature is more specifically a fixing a mark of some kind digitally to a document and it could be as simple as typing your name in a document or as more complicated like using an application like or acrobat to sign a document electronically so electronic signature does still come with some risks which is the reason why governments have been a bit slow in implementing legislation to make it happen the primary risk is of course as you would expect the question as to whether the person who is signing the document was the person who had fixed the electronic signature and obviously different electronic signature providers will give you different options of making sure that that's the case and making sure that the electronic signature is enforceable so for example platforms that come with authentication methods like using a passcode or pin number will certainly make for a more enforceable electronic signature unfortunately there are still some documents that can't be signed with electronic signature fortunately most everyday agreements can be signed by electronic signature but there are some agreements such as these which have specific documents you often having that name that cannot be signed by electronic signature or that the legal fraternity would agree shouldn't be signed by electronic signature there are also a number of documents like land titles documents where legislation specifically states how those documents must be signed or where the government department itself will simply not allow electronic signature to be used [Music] you