For firms and solo practitioners
Most electronic signature services are built around sending documents to other people. That is genuinely useful — but it is not what a small firm or solo practitioner spends most of their day doing. You are the one signing: engagement letters, routine NDAs, vendor contracts, fee agreements, releases.
The catch is that those documents carry client confidences. Sending an engagement letter or a settlement agreement through a cloud platform means a third party now holds a copy of privileged material, which turns a simple signature into a vendor-review problem.
This tool takes the opposite approach. Everything runs in your browser, on your machine. The document is never transmitted to us, so there is nothing for us to retain, subpoena, or leak.
Where the friction is
Professional-responsibility rules require you to understand how a third-party vendor handles client information before you hand it over. Avoiding the transfer entirely removes that review from the critical path.
Matter-based practices sign in bursts, not on a schedule. Paying a monthly per-user fee to sign a two-page engagement letter is hard to justify on a small matter.
An e-signature is generally fine for the contract. Whether a court will accept an electronically signed filing depends on that court's own rules, which are separate from ESIGN.
What you sign
Clear limits
Under the federal ESIGN Act and the state UETA, a signature may not be denied legal effect solely because it is electronic, provided the signer intended to sign, the signature is attributable to them, and the record can be retained and reproduced. An engagement letter or settlement agreement signed this way is enforceable in the ordinary course. What an e-signature does not do is substitute for the specific formalities some documents require — court rules, notarisation and witness requirements sit outside ESIGN and still apply.
How it works
The documents in this field are the ones people are least comfortable handing to an unfamiliar service. Our tools process them entirely in the browser.
PDF pages are rendered and written in the browser with open-source libraries that run entirely on the client. Signature strokes are captured on a canvas, and saved signatures are kept in your browser's own storage — the same mechanism any website uses to remember a preference. None of these components has a network call that transmits a file, and there is no backend for one to reach.
You do not have to take that on trust. Open your browser's developer tools, switch to the network tab, and sign a document. You will see the page's own assets load — fonts, scripts, stylesheets — and nothing else. No request carries your document, because none is made.
Where this is not the right tool. Browser-based signing is excellent for documents you sign yourself. It does not send a document to other people, collect their signatures, verify their identity, or produce an audit trail. When a counterparty or a compliance policy requires those things, use a platform built for it — the trade-off is real and worth naming rather than glossing over.
Related
FAQ
In the United States, yes for most contracts. The federal ESIGN Act and the state UETA provide that a signature cannot be denied legal effect solely because it is electronic, as long as the signer intended to sign and the record can be retained and reproduced. Engagement letters, NDAs, fee agreements and settlement agreements are routinely signed this way.
Generally no. Wills and other testamentary documents are specifically excluded from ESIGN and from most state electronic signature statutes, and typically require witnesses and sometimes notarisation. Check your state's probate code before assuming otherwise — this is one of the few areas where an e-signature is clearly not sufficient.
It removes an entire category of risk rather than managing it. Because the document is never transmitted to us, we never receive client information and there is no third-party copy to disclose, retain or lose. You still need to store the signed document in whatever system your practice already uses for client files.
For most contracts, the signed document itself is the record, and you keep it as you would any executed agreement. An audit trail and signing certificate become more valuable when the authenticity of a signature is likely to be contested, or when a client or regulator requires proof of the signing process. That is a genuine advantage of the paid platforms — it is just not needed for every document.
Yes in the ordinary course. If the settlement will be filed with a court or submitted to an agency, check that court's or agency's rules as well, since a filing requirement can impose conditions that ESIGN does not.
For validity purposes, an electronic signature does not have to look like handwriting. A typed name, a drawn mark, or an uploaded image of your signature all fall within the definition of an electronic signature. Many practitioners still prefer a drawn signature because it looks familiar to clients.
Yes. They open the signed document you send them, or sign their own copy using the same browser-based tools. Nothing needs to be installed.