Online Signature Licitness for Investment Contract in United Kingdom

How to eSign a document: online signature licitness for Investment Contract in United Kingdom

welcome to the cle of from a click to a contract formation and enforcement of agreements in the digital age i am aaron cronin and i will be the presenter of these materials today um i want to start by kind of giving you the lay of the land for my background and why this topic was kind of interesting to me and why i bothered to put it together and present it and it was that my experience has been one of being on the cusp of when technology uh started to overtake an interface directly with the legal market and so i've been kind of on the edge of everything sort of trailing behind me technology wise um as i kind of came through so i'm a true gen xer from that perspective so i've sat on both sides of the table uh so it's sort of like my parents talking about you know having black and white television and uh you know so this this conversation is directed probably at at uh gen x and older i would imagine um but it will be helpful maybe for some perspective for new attorneys coming up as well but so effectively i came out of law school in from hastings in 2000 and i was the last class to be taught how to do book research uh we started off on books and we're not allowed to use the um lexis or westlaw tools until we had learned i guess at least a couple projects through book research and had to shepardize through the old books and everything i can't even conceive of trying to do book research now uh the tools are so much better uh for digital use to be able to search things and shepardize and look things up and click on links the entire process of book of what we do as attorneys in research is is built for um i mean it perfectly matches up with what the technology can offer us so that's one place where i saw that uh we we've just had a massive improvement in in functionality and speed based on the technology that's become available it was also at the era of the dot bombs so i was planning on coming out and working in a tech company and they were folding like a house of cards when i got out of school so kind of went off into a different direction worked at a defense firm and they did not have computers at their desks we did not have computers until 2002 so we were still dictating and uh leaving let giving letters to our assistants to type up through our dictation on tape of all things which that system may or may not there's still i think a benefit to dictation with a human actually typing things but i found the the prospect of dictating something and not being able to see what i'd written was uh frustrating and it took a lot of getting used to so now my firm we moved into pure file sharing and uh you know servers and having our data in the cloud and so we don't even have things localized and so i i dealt with some cases that i was starting to again run into these electronic evidence issues and i was drawn towards electronic discovery as a a problem that needed solving so i i now do consulting and electronic discovery uh and my office is basically 90 if i wouldn't i would go to so far as to say 98 paperless and virtual and digital um with most everything happening very quickly over the internet storing things uh making copies of things and along with that came this immediate rub up against the use of paper for signing we have this completely digital process and then all of a sudden we have to jump out uh into an analog paper world physically get a paper in front of a client or even myself and sign it and then get it back into the digital world and then send it off to the the court or to the other parties and that to me appeared to be really uh inefficient and was one of the reasons why i started looking into what's the real you know we have these e-signing tools and all the courts are moving towards allowing us to do the slash s signature what is the law behind that and it seems like a law that most people don't really pay attention to so i dug into it and discovered that oh yeah there's plenty of law on this and we just seem to be kind of ignoring it so one of the things we're going to go through is the digital impact we're going to discuss uh in greater detail a little bit more about all of the the angles in which the digitization of our jobs have impacted the way that we practice um and how this specifically impacts electronic signatures and the idea of contract formation and consent or ascent and uh when that actually takes place because the the digital tools that we have at our disposal have changed the landscape of how those things work a lot of the times we can still apply analogies from the old world to the new but it doesn't always map up so there has to be specific adjustments made to to adjust for how digital tools are are changing that landscape [Music] you