Ensuring Online Signature Legality for Letter of Intent in UAE

How to eSign a document: online signature legality for Letter of Intent in UAE

Steve Dotto here. Thanks for spending time with me today. Our topic today is how to sign documents legally online on a paperless environment. There are a variety of different ways to do that. For years, I’ve used Adobe Acrobat for that particular service but there’s a great online service called that also does it. I think it’s well worth examining because not everybody can afford to pay for a full version of Adobe Acrobat that’s needed for doing that sort of digital signature so is a great web-based option. Now this is an outgrowth of this product called HelloFax. These folks have been around for a while and they have an online fax service that people use, a virtual fax service which eliminates the need for real paper fax and it’s kind of a logical step for them to move into the document signature area because so many people use faxes because of the signature capability of faxes. So this creates an electronic version of a document signing system and I quite like it. I think they’ve done quite a good job. To give you an idea of some of the industries that it works really well for, things like the real estate industry, things like insurance and my industry, speaking of business where we’ve got lots to different contracts to sign, works great in all of those different spaces. So let’s take a look at how it works. The first thing I’m going to do is I am actually going to sign in to my account. So I’ve signed up—and signup is free—and it’ll allow you to try it out and to use about three contracts per month with a few other people in the free version. But for the most part, people are going to want to upgrade to the business version which is about $12 a month, I believe. So what they’ve got here is a nice, simple little web-based interface that allows you to manage your documents and it works for you creating documents for others to sign as well as for others to create documents for you to sign. You can use it on both spaces and depending on what other tools you work with online, there are some additional benefits. For example, if you’re using Google Drive and you’re a Gmail user, there’s some really nice additional functionality in that space, which I will talk about in a moment. But at its core, it allows you to create a contract, create a document for signature, send it to somebody and have them sign it, or accept one from somebody else for you to sign. It’s as simple as that, and it follows, I think, about ten or twelve years ago, they came up with a series of laws around digital signatures online so it’s all very legally binding and it follows all those different protocols for legal signatures. But the key features that I wanted to kind of showcase to you here are first of all, the ability to create templates. Now this is where it really starts to show its strength. If you create a template, that’s a document that you might want signed over and over again if you were a realtor for instance, even just an agency agreement, you can create all of those as templates, you’ve got them stored then in your account so you can then forward them to different clients as needed and they can sign them electronically, which makes life a lot easier and reduces the amount of waste by having a little less printed paper as a result. Now each of these templates—these aren’t just dead documents—you can create fields within it where you can customize the content, people can fill in information so they can be modified so they’re living documents as far as that is concerned before they’re signed. So the template feature is huge for many, many different industries. Maybe I should jump in and show you an example. Here’s an email that has been sent to me and this is requesting my signature. This is an example. This might be a real estate sales agreement. It’s been sent to me. This is how would work if you don’t have a account and you’re just a normal person that’s been sent something from somebody that does have a . Does that make sense? So I click here to review this and sign it and it brings me into this web browser interface. Now this is if I don’t have the account. It allows me to get started. It says right there I can fill in and sign this document or download the original to review. Well, I’m happy to just get started and there it is. So there’s all the information they filled in. I can click here to sign it. Now I can draw in a signature or I can type in my signature. So let me draw it in. It’s going to be fun to draw it in, isn’t it? I can’t draw very well with my mouse but it looks like my name is Park. Okay, here’s my signature and now I can save it into sort of the course. I also have to put my initials in here so I’m just going to type that in. I’m going to type in the initials and they’ve got some script that you can use. I’ll add those initials and they’re kind of typed in. Now when you buy the business version, when you buy the upgraded version, you can actually scan in your real signature or take a digital photo of your real signature and use those as you go along. Oh, I must type in my initials. I didn’t type it in. There we go. Add my initials and there they are. I click on Agree to legally sign this document. So it’s walked me through the process, I agree, and now it’s being sent back to Gina. That’s how easy it is to send things back and forth with . Now that’s using the basic services within . If you are a Gmail user or a Google account user then you’ve got some really nice additional features. I’m going to show you this one here. This allows us to create, so that when you receive a document and you’re a Gmail or a Google account, to see that if this is the document that needs to be signed beneath here, I get this new option. Instead of downloading it to Google Drive or downloading the whole document, I can sign it right within Gmail. If you’ve got a lot of papers that you’re going to sign, if you’ve got a lot of signatures that are needed, this is pure gold because it absolutely saves you a lot of time and a lot of cycles. Now it also creates within your Google Drive account some folders so all of these documents are stored nicely for you so you’ve got a good audit trail of all of the different documents you’ve signed. You can edit the documents. You can create an editing area. You can add my signature and then I could click to attach it to an email. The document will get attached to the email thread as a draft. So I can attach it. Did you see I had a whole series of other features along the top as far as marking things up and all sorts of things? It’s now finalized the document. It them entrenches it, locks it and then sends it to all of the interested parties. That is a pretty cool service. I should tell you how much it costs because it does no good talking about all these great services and then not filling you in on the pricing. Here it is. You can use it for free and definitely give it a try first. Get comfortable with it and make sure that it works for you. Then for Business Users 1 to 10, it costs you basically $12.50 a month to use. If you’re on the road a lot, you have to sign a lot of documents, if you want to just reduce the amount of paper clutter that you have and you don’t really want to take that full step into the whole, big Adobe Acrobat world which can get very, very expensive, this is a nice software-as-a-service that will take care of your needs very effectively and efficiently. I certainly think if you’re in the real estate business, if you’re in the insurance business, if you’re in an area where you’ve got lots of different types of documents that need signature, this is a solution that is going to work spectacularly for you. I hope that I’ve done a good job of explaining to you. I appreciate you spending time with me today. I’m Steve Dotto. We’ll see you soon [END OF VIDEO]