I haven't read all the legislation in the world on this, but DocuSign has. They have been summarising legislation into their knowledge base, and proudly showing

I haven't read all the legislation in the world on this, but DocuSign has. They have been summarising legislation into their knowledge base, and proudly showing off claims that they satisfy the requirements on their country-specific homepages. For example their page on Australian laws is here https://www.docusign.com/how-it-works/legality/global/australia https://www.docusign.com/how-it-works/legality/global/austra..., and it summarises (almost verbatim) the Electronic Transactions Act 1999 (Cth)'s requirements like so: > A method [...] is used to identify the signer and to indicate the signer’s intention to sign the document; > The method used is as reliable as appropriate for the purposes of the communication or is proven to identify the person and indicate their intention; and > The signer consents to the method used, with such consent allowed to be express or inferred from the circumstances. Guess what? Australian courts apparently accept a name written at the bottom of an email as passing this test as being "as reliable as appropriate" for many situations. The barrier to entry in Australia is essentially zero. Europe has much stricter laws, introduced in the same year, in a two-tier arrangement where the strict version requires something like DocuSign, and moreover that the ability to produce a signature rests in the control of the person it identify, and that person only. (This paper http://www5.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/MqLawJl/2017/9.pdf http://www5.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/MqLawJl/2017/9.pdf argues for adopting the European approach in Australia.) A sibling comment identifies the US federal government's requirements as being essentially "we must approve individual e-sig services for use with the federal government", which is insane to me but there you go. > Docusign is not attesting to the contracts they manage ... but they are attesting that they have read the laws about e-signatures, those claims are affirmed by their continued existence, and that's worth a lot of time otherwise spent second-guessing your chosen platform. I knew roughly the position in Australia, but wasn't aware of the European requirements -- DocuSign has done a medium amount of work researching and documenting their compliance to give you peace of mind, and quite a lot of work complying with the stricter laws that are out there. There's nothing in that that is particularly difficult to replicate, i.e. there's no secret sauce, it's just a lot of work. The overall product (works for doing business with anyone you need it to) is more than the sum of its parts.