One of the questions I hear regularly about virtual law practice is related to the execution of legal documents and how that process can be handled through a virtual law office. I’ve written before on this blog about the establishment of the attorney/client relationship online and how an attorney may rely on a clickwrap agreement to ensure that the client has read and accepted all of the terms and conditions and the scope of the legal representation that will be conducted online.
I use a clickwrap to serve as the engagement letter for my virtual law office. Other attorneys will use the clickwrap in addition to uploading a traditional engagement letter for the online client to sign, scan and upload back to the virtual law office. There are many other examples of when an attorney may need to have his or her client sign a document. Having the client give the attorney a Power of Attorney to act on the client’s behalf is one of those situations.
Enter Right Signature. This application provides a way to obtain a legally enforceable digital signature on a document without your online client having to own a scanner or having to go to the trouble of printing it, signing it and uploading it back to you on your virtual law office. (Many thanks to Lee Rosen of the Rosen Law Firm for pointing this product out during our recent CLE presentation).
You can try Right Signature for free to see if it would work for your virtual law practice. It has authentication and security technology that make the digital signatures binding and legally enforceable. The product is a SaaS hosted application so the documents and the digital signatures are stored on a secure server. The process is really simple for your clients to execute so it may actually be faster to get them to sign digitally online than requiring them to upload a traditional, scanned-in signature on a document. As a useful tool for your virtual law practice, I’d say this one is worth the monthly $14 fee if you need your clients’ signatures on a regular basis or don’t want to rely on the clickwrap agreement alone.