Jay Parkhill posts about his experiments with digital signatures on contracts, and concludes that for now, nothing beats good old fashioned FAXing of a signed signature page.

That's how we frequently used to do things in the early days of my in-house legal career. I was the only lawyer in a $60+ million [sales] publicly-traded software company. Our senior execs wanted me to 'sign' all significant contracts before they did, in the sense that I would stamp them "Approved as to form" and initial them.

The problem was, we did essentially all our contract negotiation by email, exchanging marked-up drafts of Microsoft Word documents. To do the needful, I had to:

• use Word to print out the final draft of the contract;
• initial each page — I had a rubber stamp for that, fortunately;
• do the approved-as-to-form bit on the signature page;
• have my admin scan the initialed document for our files;
• email the scanned initialed document to the business people who needed it.

That proved to be pretty cumbersome, especially toward the end of the fiscal quarter when the shot clock was running down on our ability to close sales.

I found it saved time, for both me and my admin, to do this:

• export the electronic final draft from Word to a PDF file;
• use Adobe Acrobat Professional to import a graphic with a scanned image of the "Approved as to form" image with my initials already there;
• password-protect the PDF file to lock out any further edits (and also to preclude copying of text or images, if I remember correctly, but I'm not sure about that); and
• email the locked PDF file to whoever needed it (the PDF also became the Legal Department's file copy).

That was still a bit time-consuming, but way less than the former print-sign-scan routine.