Digital signatures and the paperless office talks about digital signatures and questions just why so many offices print out documents solely so people can sign them when digital signatures exist. One might assume that the legal system is still stuck in the Jurassic period and thus isn’t aware of digital signatures, but it in fact is – you know your office is out of date when it’s technologically behind the legal system. The Legal system will in most cases accept an electronically signed document. The paper also talks about the usefulness – or rather, the total and absolute lack of usefulness when you sign a credit card receipt. Go ahead – sign a receipt “Superman” or “World’s Best Instructor” or “I STOLE THIS CARD!”  and see the system’s reaction, or rather, lack of a reaction.  Thus, there is no reason why an office cannot simply use a digital signature pad and have the clients sign it rather than print paperwork for the client to sign.  Some might try to claim that a digital signature is somehow inferior to a physical one – but in reality, the reverse is true, due to the accompanying metadata IP addresses, logs, and such acting as additional evidence as compared to a physical signature.
Not only will the legal system accept the paperwork, but setting up the office might not be as hard as you think as well. This 5-year-old article from Forbes list very easy steps towards paper reduction, which are apparently beyond many offices and office managers running today (or more likely, they simply overestimate the difficulty of the steps). Harrison lists 5 tips and they are all things that I do at home every day without needing an article or research to tell me to do so. Yet, we still have offices out there that still own expensive, unreliable dedicated fax machines rather than use a service like Fax Zero or insist on printing out every document that will only ever be used internally rather than use something like Google Docs, as the article suggests. This waste of paper is the equivalent of leaving your freezer door open because you can’t be bothered to open it every time you need something.
