For professional work
Electronic signatures, by industry
Signature law is broadly consistent from one field to the next. What changes is everything around it — which documents you handle, who else has to be involved, and which of them carry an extra requirement that a signature alone will not satisfy. These guides cover that, field by field.
Law firms & legal teams
Sign engagement letters, NDAs and settlement agreements without uploading client documents to a third-party server. Free, no account, nothing transmitted.
Read the guide →Real estate agents & property managers
Sign leases, listing agreements and addenda from your phone at a showing. Nothing is uploaded to a server. Free, no account, works on any device.
Read the guide →Accountants & financial advisors
Sign engagement letters and client documents without uploading tax files or client PII to a third-party server. Browser-only processing, free to use.
Read the guide →Clinics & healthcare practices
Sign patient consent forms and intake paperwork without transmitting PHI to a third-party server. Browser-only, so no business associate relationship.
Read the guide →HR & recruiting teams
Sign offer letters, NDAs and policy acknowledgements without sending candidate data to another vendor. Free, browser-only, works on any device.
Read the guide →Consultants & freelancers
Sign statements of work, NDAs and change orders quickly without a subscription or uploading client documents anywhere. Free and browser-based.
Read the guide →What every industry has in common
Across all six of these fields, the same three questions decide how you should sign a document, and they have nothing to do with which app you open.
1. Who else is involved?
If you are the only signer and you keep the record, the document does not need to go anywhere. That is the case for a large share of professional paperwork — your own engagement letter, your half of a contract, a consent form, an internal approval. If someone else has to sign, you need a platform that sends the document and tracks it, because there is no way around storing it centrally.
2. What does the document contain?
This is where industries genuinely diverge. A settlement agreement carries client confidences, a tax return carries Social Security numbers, a patient consent carries protected health information, and a job application carries the personal data of someone who has not been hired. Handing any of those to a third-party service creates obligations — confidentiality duties, a business associate question, an FCRA requirement, or a vendor to add to your data-processing register. Processing the document locally creates none of them.
3. Does anything sit on top of the signature?
Some documents need more than a signature, and the extra requirement is usually the thing people miss:
- Notarisation or acknowledgment — recorded property instruments, certain powers of attorney, some guardianship documents.
- Witnesses — wills, codicils and other testamentary documents, which are excluded from ESIGN and most state statutes.
- Court rules — filings depend on the individual court's local rules, not on ESIGN.
- Agency and payer rules — employment eligibility verification, certain tax forms, insurance and lender packages each have their own process.
- Statutory form requirements — where a prescribed form or delivery method is required, the signature is the easy part.
Each industry guide below lists exactly which of these applies, so you can tell at a glance whether the document in front of you is a simple case or one that needs the slower route.
The honest position on privacy
Our tools run entirely in your browser. Documents are opened, signed and saved on your own device, and nothing is transmitted to us. For professional work that is not a marketing angle — it is the reason several of these industries are a natural fit. The trade-off is equally plain: we do not send documents, collect signatures from other people, or produce an audit trail, so when a matter needs that, use a platform built for it.
The statutory detail behind these claims — ESIGN, the UETA, eIDAS and the documented exceptions — is collected on our compliance reference. For a direct feature and pricing comparison against the main platforms, see comparison pages.
FAQ
Questions about signing by industry
Do different industries have different e-signature rules?
The signature law is largely the same — ESIGN federally, the UETA at state level, eIDAS in the European Union. What differs by industry is which documents carry extra requirements on top: notarisation for recorded property instruments, witness requirements for wills, verification rules around employment eligibility forms, and payer or custodian platforms that dictate the process. Those extras, not the signature itself, are what change from field to field.
Why do the industry pages mention what an e-signature cannot do?
Because the exceptions are the part that causes real problems when they are missed. A page that claims every document can be signed electronically in every field is not useful and not true. Each of our industry guides names the specific categories where you need a notary, a witness, a court rule or an agency rule instead.
Is this suitable for professional and commercial work?
Yes for the documents you sign yourself: engagement letters, statements of work, consent forms, leases, offer letters, invoices and internal approvals. It is not a replacement for a platform that sends agreements out for signature, collects multiple signatures, or produces an audit trail — our comparison pages explain where those platforms are the better choice.
Why does privacy matter more in some industries than others?
Because of what is in the document. A client engagement letter, a tax return, a patient consent form and a job applicant's paperwork all contain information that carries obligations when it is handed to a third party — confidentiality duties, PHI rules under HIPAA, FCRA requirements, or a data-processing relationship you have to document. When nothing is transmitted, none of those relationships are created.
Can I use one tool across the whole organisation?
For internal and self-signed documents, yes — there is no seat limit and no per-document cap. For documents that must be sent to clients, patients, candidates or counterparties, you will still need a platform built for sending and tracking.