Esignatures - Streamlining the conveyancing process

What are esignatures?

Esignatures, or electronic signatures, enables your customers to sign documents digitally and remotely through the InTouch client and stakeholder portal, saving you valuable time and effort.

Esignatures are fully legally binding, in the UK, EU, Australia, and many other jurisdictions.

Some special circumstances surround certain types of contracts or transactions, which vary between jurisdictions, many of them concerning land transactions. However, there have been some major strides for esignatures to be used for these purposes, for example by the Land Registry in England, read more here.

Benefits of esignatures

Esignatures provide a number of business benefits to legal practitioners and their customers;

• It reduces case time by providing instant contract signatures
• Reduces cost by both removing postage and administrative time
• Provide an improved customer service by enabling customers to sign documents whenever and wherever they prefer
• Process efficiency is achieved by removing manual process steps through automation and automatic case status updates

Stronger Signatures

A good esignature solution should be considered both safer and more trustworthy than wet signatures - especially if signing remotely due to;

• Authentication - the receiver of a signature request is required to sign in and authenticate themselves, e.g. using their email address

  • This means that the signee has validated that they are the intended recipient

• Integrity - once a signature for a document has been requested, the original document cannot be changed/swapped or tampered with

  • This means that signee is only able to sign the document you intended for them to sign

• Non-repudiation - satisfaction, in a legal sense, about where the electronic signature has come from which in turn makes the process more robust

  • This means that there is additional information strengthening the validity of the signature

Our Solution

InTouch has developed our own esignature solution in line with the requirements of eIDAS as developed by the European Technology Standards Institute and implemented throughout the EU. Our solution complies with all requirements needed to make them legally binding.

The standard set by the EU meets and in many cases exceeds, the requirements set by a number of other jurisdictions including Australia’s Electronic Transactions Act 1999 and the US Digital Signature Standard. This means that the solution can be used not just in the EU but also in the UK following Brexit and in many other jurisdictions.