2 ms·

So where is the proof that all parties signed located? On your servers? So do I rely on your company still offering the service if there is a contract dispute 5

So where is the proof that all parties signed located? On your servers? So do I rely on your company still offering the service if there is a contract dispute 5 years down the line, or how do you proof in court that the contract was signed? Second question: would you sign ndas since a lot of contracts are confidential?

hkhanna 5y ago
The proof is in a couple of places, although I will point out that all conventional electronic signature services suffer from similar issues. First, yes, it's on our servers. But crucially, all parties also receive a copy of the fully executed contract via email once it's signed. So even if Magistrate were to someday disappear, the timestamped email in your inbox serves as evidence of the contract -- assuming your email provider doesn't go out of business as well. There may be other ways of dealing with the "are you in business in 5 years" problem that we plan to explore as well.
otoburb 5y ago
The same set of questions can be applied to DocuSign or other centralized e-signature services. The answer to most of those questions would likely be "yes", but more importantly that doesn't seem to stop the viability of this type of service. If plaintext contract acceptance grows then one hopes that the middleman could be cut out and we could eventually see adoption of standard developer versioning tools adopted by in-house legal/IT teams to wrangle the plaintext contracts. Other than plaintext contract tooling (which I know is a heavy lift), this workflow would then be no different than the current practice of emailing marked-up Word documents to each other directly until the clean copy is ready for execution.
NoboruWataya 5y ago
> how do you proof in court that the contract was signed? Probably much the same way you "prove" anything: you present your evidence to the court (such as a signed PDF copy, or evidence that the parties acted as if the agreement were signed, etc) and you swear to it under oath. Of course, the other party could do the same to allege that the contract was never signed. But lying to the court can have pretty severe consequences if you are caught, so in a civil case there are generally strong incentives not to do it.
- andi999 5y ago
  Yes, but here there is no signed pdf copy. You get issued an email from the server if supposedly everyone clicked a link. So you have the email, but the other party can claim the server was faulty.

hkhanna 5y ago

The proof is in a couple of places, although I will point out that all conventional electronic signature services suffer from similar issues. First, yes, it's on our servers. But crucially, all parties also receive a copy of the fully executed contract via email once it's signed. So even if Magistrate were to someday disappear, the timestamped email in your inbox serves as evidence of the contract -- assuming your email provider doesn't go out of business as well. There may be other ways of dealing with the "are you in business in 5 years" problem that we plan to explore as well.

otoburb 5y ago

The same set of questions can be applied to DocuSign or other centralized e-signature services. The answer to most of those questions would likely be "yes", but more importantly that doesn't seem to stop the viability of this type of service. If plaintext contract acceptance grows then one hopes that the middleman could be cut out and we could eventually see adoption of standard developer versioning tools adopted by in-house legal/IT teams to wrangle the plaintext contracts. Other than plaintext contract tooling (which I know is a heavy lift), this workflow would then be no different than the current practice of emailing marked-up Word documents to each other directly until the clean copy is ready for execution.

NoboruWataya 5y ago

> how do you proof in court that the contract was signed? Probably much the same way you "prove" anything: you present your evidence to the court (such as a signed PDF copy, or evidence that the parties acted as if the agreement were signed, etc) and you swear to it under oath. Of course, the other party could do the same to allege that the contract was never signed. But lying to the court can have pretty severe consequences if you are caught, so in a civil case there are generally strong incentives not to do it.

andi999 5y ago
Yes, but here there is no signed pdf copy. You get issued an email from the server if supposedly everyone clicked a link. So you have the email, but the other party can claim the server was faulty.