Digital Signatures and Document Collaboration – a Perfect Match

25 May Digital Signatures and Document Collaboration – a Perfect Match

Some things just naturally go together – soup and sandwich, pork and beans, peanut butter and jelly, and the list goes on and on. In the technology sector, we see that same situation – some things just naturally go together. Collaboration and Digital Signatures on documents are two technologies that naturally fit together. When you finish collaborating with other parties on a contract, what do you have to do? You have to sign it to make it legal!

As I have outlined earlier, collaboration is one of those words that has many different meanings and if you speak to 10 different people, you will get ten different answers.

Here are some of the key pain points surrounding collaboration on documents that can be heard from the legal practice across North America.

  1. Version control problems are a significant issue when reviewing legal documents.
  2. Everyone has difficulty finding documents in a complicated file and folder structure that they didn’t create.
  3. The use of Word Track Changes makes documents virtually unreadable if multiple people are collaborating and multiple versions are involved.  This leads to potential unintended legal loopholes since the document is so difficult to read.
  4. Opposing Counsel make changes to documents that are not picked up by Word Track Changes and are missed by the Originating Counsel who is the document author.
  5. Everyone has a unique writing style and multiple people changing a legal document lead to multiple writing styles, which could lead to unintended loopholes in the contract.
  6. The document review process is a serial review process, is inefficient, and can be delayed significantly if someone is unavailable.
  7. There are multiple documents in review with many different people with differing completion dates and it is very difficult to track all of those documents, people and delivery dates.
  8. Opposing Counsel has either not responded or has responded very quickly to a request for a document review.  The Originating Counsel wonders if the Opposing Counsel has even read the document.

Do any of those sound familiar to you?   SavvyDox addresses all of those issues with an end user focused cloud based application that can be implemented in less than a day.

When implementing digital signatures, there are significant concerns about the validity of the signature. How did the application really verify that the person using the application is really the person associated with that signature? From a security perspective, how does the application guarantee that the document has not been tampered with after it has been digitally signed? The technology to answer these questions would seem like rocket science to those not familiar with the intricacies of the process. Suffice it to say, it involves a lot of very complicated mathematics.   One thing that is really difficult is the ability to validate a document and signature without having to log back into the application that generated the signature in the first place. SIGNiX, a cloud based application, can guarantee that the signature is valid, guarantee that the document has not been tampered with AND allow you to do all that without signing back into SIGNiX.

As a soup and salad combination in the document management space, SavvyDox and SIGNiX have signed an agreement to partner together to sell a soup and sandwich combo. Find out more here.