I’m about to take a family vacation that’s going to last until Labor Day and my lawyer will be sending me pdf documents that he want’s me to print out, sign, scan the document, email the doc back and then mail the original. Well I’m not going to bring a printer with me. So my only solution is to use a digital signature app that will allow me to open a pdf and sign the document save and send it back. Any suggestions?
Thanks
On my Surface tablet the Acrobat Reader app has the ability to natively add signatures into PDF docs, pretty easily too.
I suppose that might work, but would it be a legally signed document that the courts will accept? I thought that an encrypted public and private key are needed for the signature to be legally binding?
That is a good question I can not answer.
Legally speaking? Well I have used that when we were signing documents for various items pertaining to buying our house. However I am not sure what other encryption/ protections were used.
I know you can set passwords and encryption for PDFs but I’ve never really dealt with that.
When we bought a house, the mortgage company used docusign for our signatures, and now I wish everyone used it. Having to print out, sign, and return a pdf feels so clumsy and outdated now.
Yea, I used docusign for our house and custody battle for my nieces. It is great, however the mortgage lender and lawyer always sent me an email that logged me in, then I reviewed, signed, accepted and it was over. This time I need to be able to take a pdf the lawyer sends me via email e-sign on my own and send it back
A flattened PDF, I don’t believe they can tell if you printed it, signed it, and rescanned it or you signed it electronically. A lawyer who does a tech podcast I listen to has said many times he signs documents on his iPad. So it must be fine. ;-)
I think I found my solution. Foxit reader has some digital signature options. I can insert my hand written signature and then sign and certify. Foxit actually creates an encrypted pfx file for me. No need to use an online service. Should be able to digitally sign the documents, protect it and then send it back. Thanks to everyone for the help, especially CraigM and LeeAbe for their suggestions. Those suggestions got me to look a little closer at Foxit’s options.
I refinanced my mortgage recently and digitally signed all documents other than the legally binding closing (which had to be notarized in person) just using the PDF viewer built into iOS. Be sure to encrypt the documents before emailing them as email is not secure. I just used encrypted ZIP files.
Docusign is the standard method used by lawyers and meets all legal requirements - your own lawyer should be able set you up with it if required.
Do you need to register an account? How does Docusign know you are really you?
You don’t and it doesn’t. I’m a contractor and have signed my fair share of guff through it. The only ‘security’ is that the link sent to your email will have a unique token that will tie it to the email address, but that’s irrelevant since email doesn’t have end to end encryption for 99.999% of people using it.
I’m not sure if there may be some more ‘secure’ option that involves extra checks but I’ve never had to face it. I keep a png of my signature handy because I’m too lazy just to sign up. Not that you even have to use your ‘proper’ signature of course - it happily generates one for you if you ask it to.
It’s all thoroughly, mind numbingly stupid of course, but that’s been true of signatures as a general concept since the introduction of the clone stamp tool. At least it’s convenient, and I guess they’ll do the usual data scrape of your IP address etc and log it alongside.
At least it’s not quite as dumb as that time a mortgage company insisted I print out their 50+ page gibberish, sign it with ‘real ink’ then scan it back in and email it to them. And get my accountant to do the same too.