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hey everyone it's Tracy we're from 8-11 here you know document security is a huge issue to everyone in real estate but document security isn't quite the same thing as e-signatures even though it's easy to confuse the two that's because they're part and parcel to each other when Congress passed the e sign act back in two thousand it only covered the act of signing documents electronically but it didn't really address how to make the electronic signature enforceable and that's why there's a whole industry dedicated to document security today document security is about ensuring that the entire document including the signature is enforceable not just at the moment of signing but for years to come and since you're dealing with the home it's super important to make sure that those documents can stand up for 20 or 30 years since there's quite a bit of confusion about a sign and document security I wanted to put together a short primer on what it is and what it isn't and how you can tell if a document has been hacked this video is going to talk about the principles but then dive in to two services that offer e-sign car to be in debt loop because they compete and they're both in real estate first of all what's important about digital signatures and secure documents is that they hold up in court as we all know lawsuits can come and go now our years in the future so it's important that you choose a vendor that's likely to be around in a few years right now some of the big players are Adobe also known as a cosine sine X also known as diging DocuSign which recently acquired Carter v instinet and hello fax and there's lots of others about that loop is a transaction management platform I'm including them in this analysis because they have a proprietary sign product that's built right into their platform so let's talk generally about what makes a digital signature and digitally signed document legal in the first place first and foremost what counts is that we know who signed the document this is usually accomplished through a variety of authentication factors but the east sign firms worth their salt and the ones that comply with the law always use the date-time email IP address and a couple of other proofing options like a one-time pad werd phone authentication witness signing use a digital certificate to validate that you are who you say you are what you want here is a tamper-proof signature that shows that you as the document signer are who you say you are it should be next to impossible to reproduce your digital signature without authorization you want to make sure that whoever signed the document actually intended to do so that's why you always see language when you're about to digitally sign something that says I intend to do this once you're signed in and authenticated now you want to make sure that the signature complies with the rules and regs from a Gillian government agencies like the FDIC Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and of course there are special rules for real estate thanks to the lenders the signature has to be formed correctly to be the same as a wet signature according to the federal assign act and the vendor that's providing the e sign service has to retain the records and get the consumers consent for financial institutions like Bank of America and Wells Fargo to even consider a sign documents valid they want to see the consumer answer set of questions use unique email address and a new password and let's not forget about in 10 either the banks want a specific form of consumer consent before signing documents digitally otherwise they won't accept them when they're presented the bank's want the consumer to receive a tamper-proof sealed certificate of completion transaction log or audit trail the bank thinks this makes it so that your client can't just go out and randomly sign things which is probably a good thing that's why every sign vendors UI that complies with a federal assign Act makes you feel like you're signing on the bottom line with initials in a full signature all of that data is collected now it's about making the entire document tamper proof and showing that the document has been tampered with if it has much of this is about using what are called hash values which are like a unique fingerprint for the document here's one way it works if I sign and seal a document a hash value a long string of unique numbers is generated and its associated with this sealed document but if I somehow change the document after you've signed it new hash value is generated and they don't match anymore so you can tell that the document has been tampered or altered and your signature is then invalidated now there are lots of other ways documents are secured but the point is is that you should be able to tell if the document is altered without having to dig at it for the top vendors in the space there's always a visible e-sign vendor stamp on the document itself to indicate which platform was used the big vendors in the space also use a clearly visible signature panel that shows that the signature is validated it signifies that the document you're looking at was electronically signed confirms which tool was used to sign the document and identifies if any changes have been made to the document since it was signed this is basically a third-party validation of the signed document now there's another piece of this puzzle you need to think about electronically secured documents need to be self-reliant so what does that mean well simple you should never have to go to the vendors website to validate a copy of the document you already have that's because not everybody involved in the home purchase process from the bank and the title company are likely to use tools like car to the Year dot loop they're using whatever system they have and they just want your documents the ones they can tell our original valid and legally enforceable so the documents have to be freestanding and legally enforceable on their own at all times independent of the system that was used to electronically sign the document you should be able to see everything you need or tell that the document has been altered by examining the document itself keep in mind that that's not the same thing as clicking a link in the document to go to the vendors platform to view the original signed document behind a password that's because despite all of the audit trails and record retention regulations in the world companies change they go on a business they get bought or you might lose your login access self-reliant documents build all the security right into the document itself these types of documents can show the original untampered with document with the click of a button because it's stored with the document itself now you may be thinking to yourself it's all electronic and everything electronic can ultimately be changed or tampered with if wants to that's absolutely true you can use tools like Adobe Acrobat PDF Expert or Photoshop to alter documents even those produced through Adobe docusign or sine X but here's the thing when a document has been electronically signed using the big guys all you need to do is open the document without going to any other system to know whether it's the official signed document or if it's been altered you can check out the signature panel that states that this is in the original unaltered signed document it will tell you if the document has been altered since it was signed it will also identify what changes have been made since it was signed and link to the original signed document but if there's no signature panel at all that's a sign of trouble to a bank and since the bank's train their teams to look for it documents without a signature panel are likely to be rejected and that slows everything down the bank's care because they want the documents to have teeth and be legally enforceable now let's go take a peek at how Carter V and dot loop work so here's the deal has already uploaded a little test agreement into a transaction room within card avi and I've distributed it out to myself here you can see that it's out to me to sign and so I received an email review click the email and here it is in docusign ready to go so what I want to do now is go ahead and sign it which is pretty easy it says confirm your name initials and signature signature style you can even change them change it if you like that one looks good to me you can see that it has a little statement here by clicking adopt I agree that the signature and initials would be the electronic representation of my signature blah blah blah I'm going to adopt that in sign which makes it legal and now everything is done so I'm going to go ahead and view the certificate which shows exactly how assigned when it was signed what address it was sent to you can see an IP address timestamp you can see who sent it to me which was me and you can see and also a big long envelope number so let's go ahead and finish this off and all required fields are complete and we are now done so if we look at that loop here you can see I have to put the same document in the test folder it's test agreement I've already sent it out for a signature and what you'll see here is that it pops right up you can see it's the same exact document and I've put in the signature block here and so now I'm going to go ahead and sign it and you can see I have this same confirm your signature looks a little different kind of a fancy cool signature which might actually look like that and it says by clicking confirm I have read and understand dot loops e-sign consumer consent disclosures in terms of use I agree in my electronic signature and initials so how the same force and effect as my written signature or initial so I'm going to go ahead and confirm that and sign and it looks like we're on our way I can also go ahead and add in the date here which is july 5 2013 and i'm done i'm going to go ahead and sign back into that loop ok so here we are back in da loop and we can see that the document is here haven't shared it with anybody but we can see that it's signed which is great looks good and what I can do now is download this document which is what i want to do so let's go ahead and zoom into this document from da loop what I'm curious to know is what I can change now the document looks great it has all the right formatting it's got this great-looking signature block down here but I am curious to know if I can use standard tools out of adobe acrobat it's about 170 dollar program which many many people have to see if i can change this document which has been signed and certified and dot loop says is legally binding by federal statute so let's see if i can change it so first thing i want to do is see if i can grab the signature and move it down and it looks like i can i'm also able to if I want to become barbara jones and i can put that right back into the signature block i can also even adjust the formatting of the signature block to accommodate this longer title now the challenge here is that this signature based on this PDF is still valid but i can go ahead and change the change the signature code here to GA BS from whatever it was I'm also able to go ahead and edit the purchase price the amount to be financed if these changes are subtle someone might not notice that they're there and because it says it's legally binding and it's outside of that loop it may look real so it could be super confusing now i'm going to go ahead and save this document and let's see if the changes are accepted when I reopen the document so I'm going to go ahead and save this to my desktop and i'm going to call this modified and let's go ahead and close it and open it up and the changes I made are still right there 15 million dollars 12 million dollars barbara jones and it still has the electronic signature which is legally and binding by federal statute except the document has changed so the issue with this document is that it's hard to tell whether it's real coming straight out of that loop it's unlocked when it comes out of that loop it doesn't have a signature panel and so thus it's likely to be rejected by a bank if they're working within their own system and not on the dot loop platform all right let's go ahead and take a quick peek at the car to be document we can see that when it comes out of car to be it's obviously a DocuSign document it has a signature panel the signature panel shows everything that's about the document that it hasn't been modified since the signature was applied that the signers identity is valid that the signature is time stamped on the docuscience server and i can even go ahead and click to view a signed version of the document right in the document itself I'm also able if I want to go ahead and check the security details of the document so i can look at the certificate i can see all the algorithms that have been applied so that all looks good now the question i have is is it possible for me to go ahead and edit this document as is coming directly out of DocuSign i'm going to go ahead and pick the text tool and try to go ahead and do that and it's not letting me change a thing now I did say that any document including docusign Adobe sinx they can all be modified so let's take a look at how that's done most important thing is that you can go ahead and extract this page and open it up a new now if I want to go ahead and change anything like this word i'll go ahead and select the text tool and we'll go ahead and change that just like i did in that loop i can go ahead and change the numbers so it becomes a fairly simplistic affair to modify and tamper with this document but let's see what happens when I save it I'm going to save it as car to be modified let's go ahead and close this and open up the modified document and see what happens so we can see that all of a sudden the signature panel is gone and to any bank that will be a sure sign that this document is not a real DocuSign document even though it says it has a DocuSign envelope ID now there's another example that i want to show you i went to a service called cute PDF and i modified this document within that net service let's go ahead and take a look at that so I added in some fields and some differences here and what you'll notice is is that in a signature panel it now says that it's invalid there were errors in the formatting the signers identity is not be up and verified and the signature and data time are from my computer and not the docusign server so to a bank looking at this they're going to know that this is a tampered with document so that's a good look at what a secure document looks like versus one that is insecure and again it's not about the signature it's about the whole document hope this has been useful and I would love to hear your comments thanks very much and look forward to talking to you soon