

Teach your lawyer to sign contracts electronically - idiopathic
http://blog.patientsknowbest.com/2009/06/17/how-to-work-with-your-law-firm-for-electronic-contracts/

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smanek
""" First of all, there is only one version of the document, so no one is ever
unsure if they are editing an old draft. [...] Second, version tracking is
built-in so you lawyer can see what changes you made, and spend time looking
at those changes rather than rereading the whole document. """

Wow, sounds like lawyers really need to learn about Revision Control Systems.
I suppose they don't work as well (diff'ing, etc) on documents that are
effectively big binary blobs (like .doc(x)) - but that just makes me think
they need to learn how to use LaTeX ;-)

Incidentally, am I understanding these online 'e-signing' services (e.g.,
<http://www.echosign.com>) properly? Isn't a user basically trusting their
private-key to the service?

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idiopathic
They understand revision control because it is built into Word... But my
previous lawyer would send the document to me and to my CFO, each of us would
make changes and I would talk to the lawyer on the phone. Soon there were
three versions of the document, so there were threads going back and forth
around "which is the latest document".

As for EchoSign, they authenticate that the person who signed the document
must have at one point clicked through a link which went to their e-mail
address. This is much better than the authentication of written signatures,
i.e. that someone could scribble something on a piece of paper in the same way
that you did it.

~~~
newy
Outlook as revision control ftw. No seriously, lawyers must first get off the
habit of marking up documents by hand. Everything else can come later.

~~~
idiopathic
Er... do these lawyers still exist? Fortunately I never met one, and if I did,
I could never afford their inefficiency. Every lawyer I ever worked with used
Microsoft Word for all their documents.

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ajb
Someone should point the FSF at this :-)

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helveticaman
I've never had any experience with any of this, but this sounds very practical
in theory.

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amadiver
I read this as "Teach, you lawyer, to sign contracts electronically." :)

