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Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?

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Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?

#221
post #41

If you want to e-sign lease agreements, you don’t need any special software. You can just have the signee type their name in the signature space and email the document back to you. The date of the email will be evidence of the timestamp, and the email records are commonly accepted in court. That’s just as legally binding as Docusign. The reason people use Docusign is to keep track of a large number of legal ageeement…

Although be aware that the specifics of what is acceptable vary from state to state. To say nothing of non-US jurisdictions.

That is absolutely not true. Email is valid for signatures in all common law jurisdictions (i.e. English speaking jurisdictions except Louisiana) and Louisiana.

It’s a fundamental principle of common law that agreements are contracts even if you don’t follow some specific procedure (such as pen and paper signatures or Docusign) to agree to them.

In the US, federal law (UCC) deviates from common law jurisprudence by requiring that some contracts be written and signed, but it says that signing is “using any symbol executed or adopted with present intention to adopt or accept a writing” (i.e., anything is a signature if you intend it to be one) and that the symbol may be produced “manually or by means of a device or machine” (e.g. a computer).

In the U.S., Louisiana does not follow common law (they are based on Roman/ pre-Napoleonic French law) but they explicitly recognized electronic signatures in 2006.

So, no, you don’t have to be aware of specifics that vary state to state. You can use email/PDFs/anything else to sign a document anywhere in the English speaking world.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coinbase is overvalued because people don’t understand the difference between Coinbase (which has enourmous fees for guaranteeing a price for selling/buying cryptocurrencies) and Coinbase Pro (which is a market maker with lots of competitors, where you can just create a market order and you will execute the trade with a much more competitive margin). As competitors copy the ease of use (like Strike with a 0 profit on…

AFAIK Coinbase Pro isn’t a market maker, it’s a marketplace . a market maker would be someone who offers to buy/sell some asset for a specific price. for example when i use Coinbase Pro to place an offer to buy 1 Bitcoin for $55000, i’m acting as a market maker. all the same, i agree with you: it’s already cheaper to use Coinbase Pro as an on-ramp to obtain USDC and then trade the USDC on a decentralized exchange tha…

> for example when i use Coinbase Pro to place an offer to buy 1 Bitcoin for $55000, i’m acting as a market maker.

My understanding is different. When you place an order, you're absorbing liquidity from the marketplace. A market maker is the party that generates liquidity by fulfilling orders, not the party that destroys it by placing them.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?

#223

My guess - DocuSign has a hard to penetrate moat: It's known and accepted in courts. Everything else doesn't really matter. Imagine you're a legal department. You have to choose between DocuSign, which you know the court will accept, or a competitor. DocuSign costs 10x as much as the competitor. But that's nothing compared to the cost of litigation, or worse, the cost of losing litigation. So you will likely choose D…

I don’t think this premise is correct; I don’t know of any evidence that courts accord any special status to Docusign’d documents, over other ways of electronically signing contracts. The concept doesn’t even make sense to me… Docusign is not attesting to the contracts they manage. They’re not an automated notary. They’re just facilitating something that anyone can do themselves: electronically sign a contract. There…

I haven't read all the legislation in the world on this, but DocuSign has. They have been summarising legislation into their knowledge base, and proudly showing off claims that they satisfy the requirements on their country-specific homepages. For example their page on Australian laws is here https://www.docusign.com/how-it-works/legality/global/austra..., and it summarises (almost verbatim) the Electronic Transactions Act 1999 (Cth)'s requirements like so:

> A method [...] is used to identify the signer and to indicate the signer’s intention to sign the document;

> The method used is as reliable as appropriate for the purposes of the communication or is proven to identify the person and indicate their intention; and

> The signer consents to the method used, with such consent allowed to be express or inferred from the circumstances.

Guess what? Australian courts apparently accept a name written at the bottom of an email as passing this test as being "as reliable as appropriate" for many situations. The barrier to entry in Australia is essentially zero. Europe has much stricter laws, introduced in the same year, in a two-tier arrangement where the strict version requires something like DocuSign, and moreover that the ability to produce a signature rests in the control of the person it identify, and that person only. (This paper http://www5.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/MqLawJl/2017/9.pdf argues for adopting the European approach in Australia.) A sibling comment identifies the US federal government's requirements as being essentially "we must approve individual e-sig services for use with the federal government", which is insane to me but there you go.

> Docusign is not attesting to the contracts they manage

... but they are attesting that they have read the laws about e-signatures, those claims are affirmed by their continued existence, and that's worth a lot of time otherwise spent second-guessing your chosen platform.

I knew roughly the position in Australia, but wasn't aware of the European requirements -- DocuSign has done a medium amount of work researching and documenting their compliance to give you peace of mind, and quite a lot of work complying with the stricter laws that are out there. There's nothing in that that is particularly difficult to replicate, i.e. there's no secret sauce, it's just a lot of work. The overall product (works for doing business with anyone you need it to) is more than the sum of its parts.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the wrapping is glorified. But the contents of the document is the most important IMHO

The value DocuSign offers isn’t the display of the original document. It’s the claim that someone “signed” it (by ticking a checkbox) and that somehow this is being accepted by the courts.

From experience, the legitimacy or authority of the signer has never been of question in cases brought to court. Maybe it's more relevant in the US, but in 99% of the cases I followed through has been around the interpretation of the actual terms.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?

#225
There is ZealID[0] - which gives you a free QES (legally its equivalent to a handwritten signature and has to be accepted all over europe.

And there is easyID[1]. Who are similar to docusign but with a per signature fee (around 10cent). They also habe a nextcloud integration [2]

[0]https://www.zealid.com/en/consumers

[1]https://eideasy.com/

[2]https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/electronicsignatures

Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?

#227

First a disclaimer: I am no lawyer, but I am one of the co-founders of Skribble[0], an e-signature provider from Switzerland. I don't want to go into details but depending on which country you need your signatures to be legally binding and the type of contract you are signing, you might need a higher signature standard than the one you get from DocuSign. At Skribble we offer all 3 signature standards defined by the E…

Disclaimer: I'm no lawyer, either.

It seems that DocuSign has been suiting up on eIDAS signatures, too[0]; I'm not sure if they're compliant with the Swiss snowflake ZertES though since that one's incompatible with eIDAS.

[0] https://www.docusign.co.uk/how-it-works/electronic-signature... ("Easiest-to-use, eIDAS compliant digital signature solution, including EU Advanced and EU Qualified Signatures")

Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?

#228

I just use the PDF sign feature which basically adds a picture of my signature to the document. No one has noticed so far :=)

Most people will go with less. Print the page. Signature it by pen. Scan it send it per mail. The other party prints and signature it and send it back.

A scanned signature is not a handwritten one and it leaves you with a sub-standart signature. But courts accept it while it even if its not to the letter of the law.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?

#229
FYI since you mention Lease Documents. Specifically for Lease Documents Zillow has an upload and sign ( or in some states a free lease builder ) you don’t have to list a property just go straight to the leases section

Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think this premise is correct; I don’t know of any evidence that courts accord any special status to Docusign’d documents, over other ways of electronically signing contracts. The concept doesn’t even make sense to me… Docusign is not attesting to the contracts they manage. They’re not an automated notary. They’re just facilitating something that anyone can do themselves: electronically sign a contract. There…

I haven't read all the legislation in the world on this, but DocuSign has. They have been summarising legislation into their knowledge base, and proudly showing off claims that they satisfy the requirements on their country-specific homepages. For example their page on Australian laws is here https://www.docusign.com/how-it-works/legality/global/austra... , and it summarises (almost verbatim) the Electronic Transacti…

IANAL, but the law says in France, anything with a written name as a signature is valid, although I suppose with limitations, but it is very clear that an email with a signature is enough for child custody agreements, and theoretically an SMS would be enough too, although I don’t know if the SMS has been tested in court. Apart from harassment cases.
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