BEWARE: This E-Signature Mistake Could Land You in Court

In the e-signature industry (like most other industries), companies are looking to lock you into their products. If they can't keep you around with good service and great products, they'll use sneaky practices to make sure you have to stay with them forever. 

Some less trustworthy e-signature vendors build in roadblocks to lock you into their service. That way, they can raise their prices or change their policies without worrying too much about losing you as a customer—a practice called “vendor lock-in.”

E-Signature Vendor Lock-In

In the e-signature industry, vendor lock-in is often hidden in the signature verification process (when you go to prove the document is real and hasn’t been tampered with).

Instead of embedding the legal evidence to support the signature into the document, many e-signature vendors’ signatures are just an image with a link back to their website for verification.

What happens if you want to switch vendors? What if they go out of business get acquired or decide to change their technology?

You’re putting your company at significant risk if you have to rely on that one company to verify signatures on your documents for the lifetime of the documents themselves, which can sometimes span decades.

Easy Verification with SIGNiX

With SIGNiX, it's fast and easy to prove your documents are valid. Our digital signatures and their cryptographic information are embedded into each signed document, so you don’t need to be a SIGNiX customer (or come back to our website) just to check if your documents are valid. You don’t even need to be connected to the Internet to verify your signatures!

SIGNiX-signed documents can be easily verified using free PDF reader software. There’s no need for you to be online. All you have to do is hover over a signature to find out if the signature is valid. To see more information, simply click on the signature to open the Signature Properties dialog box.

This dialog box contains a rich set of information about the signature: the name of the signer, a timestamp of the signature, the nature of the document when it was signed and other technical details.

This is a quick and easy way to know if your documents have been tampered with. SIGNiX’s documents also come with a highly detailed audit trail.

Digital signatures offer you verification offline and are embedded into the document.

This level of evidence isn't just good in theory—it has kept our clients out of court!  

Cumbersome and Risky Verification

Contrast that with most other electronic signature vendors. Instead of including the data you need to prove the document is valid within the document itself, they send customers back to the vendor’s own website to retrieve information about the signature. 

The signature isn’t embedded into the document—in fact, information about the signature is likely stored with the vendor.  

And even though the vendor may let a customer download these documents, if there’s ever a question about an individual’s signature, the lack of information in their audit trails means the customer always has to come back to the vendor, resulting in vendor lock-in. 

This image shows the link presented when you hover over a signature created by another vendor. Clicking on it opens a browser window, requiring that a recipient be online to get at any additional information. 

Worse, if the vendor’s website goes down or the vendor goes out of business, you wouldn’t have any evidence to prove that your documents are valid.

Don’t believe us? Try to verify one of “the other guys’” documents without an Internet connection. You’ll be left with a “page not found” error. I'm no lawyer, but I'm guessing a judge and jury wouldn’t be convinced by an error message. If one of your signed documents can’t be verified, you run the risk that it might be deemed inadmissible in court.