LawHawk Blog

Digital signing presents many benefits, effectively resolving numerous issues that typically plague the contracting process. It eliminates the cumbersome tasks of printing, signing, scanning, emailing, and compiling counterparts of documents. With digital signing, the constant need to chase signatories for completion is eliminated.

Once a digital signing process is completed, each party automatically receives a copy of the contract via email and a secure PDF. The encrypted PDF ensures that neither the signatures nor the document’s content can be altered without invalidating its authenticity.

Various solutions provide access to digital signing functionality, each with its own set of features.

I often talk to in-house lawyers who are unhappy with a technology solution they're using and are looking for a replacement.

When digging deeper, it often appears that they are not using it as intended to be used and are overlooking core features, which is a large part of the issue. Without using it properly, I think it's unfair to make judgements about how good it is, and hard to tell what you need in an alternative. 

Earlier this month I was at the ILANZ conference. It was an excellent event - the best ILANZ I have been to.

There were several indications that technology for lawyers has matured a lot over the last year.

Artificial Lawyer recently published an article by Karl Chapman, the CEO of Kim Technologies. The Democratization of Document Automation: We have Reached the Tipping Point.

I'm sure that Kim is an excellent piece of technology, and anything that can make it easier to create automated templates at lower cost is a good thing. But this article significantly oversimplifies the work required to get good outcomes from an automation project.

A lot of the focus when procuring new technology is on the initial upfront costs and the ongoing software and support costs. Fair enough, these are important in evaluating the cost of the new solution.

What often seems to be overlooked are the costs of the current process and the costs of delay. This often comes up when someone in charge of the business process has determined that they have a problem they would like to fix. When a solution they would like is agreed upon, they then need broader support from other teams, such as IT or procurement.

This can result in months, sometimes years, of delay, perhaps while the IT team consider if it would cost less for them to build a solution themselves.

In an earlier post, I suggested that customers should focus more on the relationship with their suppliers and less on the current technology features. Because requirements are changing so quickly, the supplier must be able to keep up.

A great relationship should not just be reactive. A good supplier will understand and care enough about the customer's business and changing requirements to proactively suggest improvements that the customer can adopt to get even better results.

Much of what we do here at LawHawk is far more about relationships, rather than technology.

There are so many ways of doing things better, using different types of technology or none, that you can only figure out the right approach for a particular customer through collaborative, open, discussion.

I believe this is true in any industry, but particularly in legal because many common processes are so overly complex – and sometimes bizarre – that it can be hard to unpick how they currently work, and how they ideally would work given the people involved and other relevant circumstances, without really good communication and trusting relationships.

Two things particularly reminded me of this recently.

On 9 April, Rohan Cochrane (Director, Family Law Specialists) and I delivered a webinar for the New Zealand Law Society on Remote witnessing and signing of documents during COVID-19 lock-down.

There were nearly 4,000 people on the webinar, which gives some indication of the extent to which lawyers are looking for new solutions at this time.

We didn't have a lot of time to prepare for the webinar, as it was put together on short notice.  My thinking was still coming together during the webinar, as I saw questions coming through on the chat feed.  It’s continuing to evolve, which is why I’m writing this post.

Our goal in the webinar was to look at some of the areas that appear to be causing the most issues, and to identify the most practical approaches we could.  

We weren't suggesting that anything we said was sure to be legally effective, or accepted by every other party to a process (e.g. the recipient of an affidavit).

We also weren't suggesting that these were the only, or even the best way to manage things.  I’m working on further ideas, and would certainly be keen for others that were on the webinar to build further on our suggestions, or to come up with better alternatives, and share those.  

Having had a little more time to reflect on things, I’ve been able to summarise my thinking further.  These views are my own, and not necessarily those of Rohan, the NZLS, or anyone else! 

I like learning about new legal technologies, and how they can help me, but like most people I can still struggle to find time to try them all out.

A good example is digital signatures.  I’ve known about them for years, and always thought they will eventually be the way that we sign all our documents, but haven’t made the time to look into it and why I should use it now.  However a couple of weeks ago Mike Eyal from Secured Signing and I caught up again after first meeting at the LawFest Conference in May.  Secured Signing are another New Zealand based legal technology company, established in 2010 with a number of satisfied customers.

Mike showed me how the Secured Signing system works, and I could tell it was a natural fit for our document automation system and something I wanted to start using.  We have now built a Secured Signing integration which we can drop into any of our automated document templates so that users can automatically create Secured Signing “Smart Tags”.  These are very simple pieces of formatted text that the Secured Signing system can recognise and act on to manage the digital signing process.