Overview

If your business produces documents that need to be signed, digital signatures could allow you to cut your costs dramatically. Once a document is reduced to paper, it becomes an expense that you will deal with for years.

Despite all the improvements in document creation and document delivery, the pen and ink signature remains a process bottleneck, a sinkhole of lost efficiency.

Today, both Federal Law and Revised Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code allow for the creation of enforceable contracts electronically. Civil Twilight uses the DocuSign online signing service, a patented process that allows users to sign using a script font with sender-selected authentication options, including Fair Isaac ID verification.

Anyone who has an email address and access to the internet can sign electronically.

Digital signatures are a key component of Civil Twilight’s services. Currently, documents that need to be executed are delivered to signatories either via e-mail, facsimile, messenger service, USPS or overnight courier. By whatever means they arrive, they are still paper documents that must be signed (and printed, if e-mailed) and returned to the sender in order to effectuate the transaction.

At this point in the traditional signing process, the sender is subjected to alteration risk, because the documents are no longer in its control - there is nothing to prevent an unscrupulous recipient from retyping a page in a word processor and substituting it for one provided by the sender. In the digital signature scenario, the document is locked and cannot be altered by the recipient.

Paper documents also create a myriad of other problems. The documents can be misplaced, partially or incorrectly signed, or lost in transit. Once returned, counterpart signature pages must be located, collated and assembled. The original documents must then be copied, distributed, filed and maintained.

With digital signatures, the same document can be instantaneously, simultaneously and correctly executed by all parties. Each signatory is notified immediately upon complete execution of the document and can receive a copy electronically, without cost to the sender. The original is maintained on a redundant, secure server. The sender no longer needs to collate, copy, fax, file or store the original.

Digital signatures are enforceable under federal and state law, and the UCC, with a very limited number of exceptions for testamentary and similar documents.

Civil Twilight will work with your business to implement a digital signature strategy that incorporates, yet streamlines, the business’s current practices for document execution. This will enable the business to complete execution of forms/documents faster and more efficiently, giving it an advantage over its competition, in addition to offering flexibility to its clientele.