It starts with drawing up the proper forms, and filling out your relevant sections. Then you hand the bundled up documents to a courier service. The courier then gets the documents to the client or the other side, who then signs their sections, and has them sent back to you. Now that you finally have the documents back in your possession they can be reviewed and filed.
This whole process is riddled with inconveniences and inefficiencies and in most cases should be left in the distant past; a time before technology had revolutionised the way we handled legal paperwork. There are still a lot of firms that do things this way, though, mostly because it's the way they've always done them. But these are institutions with hundreds, if not thousands of lawyers, change moves like a glacier for them. But not you, you're a start-up or a small law firm, you may have smaller numbers but that means you can be fluid and adapt to change quickly. When you look at the cost in terms of time, effort, and money that the more traditional process takes, it makes you wonder why you're still doing things the old fashioned way especially when there is a viable alternative.
Chances are good that since the beginning of 2020, if not earlier, you've used eSigning. At its most basic, eSigning is when you receive a digital document via a secured service, and you fill it out like you would any other legal document. The only difference is that instead of filling out your name, address, and signature with a pen, you're doing it with a keyboard. Once you have all the areas filled out, you simply click to confirm that you agree that the form looks the way you want it to, and that's it... you're done!
This digital transition can work wonders for firms who currently aren't taking advantage of it. For starters, it all but cuts out the middleman when sending your documents over the internet rather than physically transporting them. This makes sure the documents arrive at their destination in seconds, greatly reducing the amount of time the whole process takes. Couriers are generally pretty reliable, but there are still cases of them not turning up or taking longer than they should to get documents where they need to be, this is an issue in legal practice where every minute counts.
Using a digital signing service costs pennies when compared to a more traditional courier as well, which added on top of the time saving makes it a valuable resource saver. Not only that, you have multiple signed digital copies rather than having a single signed copy which runs the risk of misplacement. there's no risk of paper documents being ruined by weather, or damaged in transit, requiring the whole process to start over again from the top. You can email them to business partners, back them up on the cloud, and access them when you need them with legal software that integrates seamlessly with it, such as mattero.
Jumping on the bandwagon whenever a new technology comes out can feel like a risk. However, eSigning has been around for a while now, and services like InfoTrack's SignIt technology, which integrates with mattero have proven themselves to be functional as well as reliable. What's more is that you can use it from anywhere, any time, on any device, mattero is a web-based Software as a Service (SAAS) meaning you can get documents signed and stored while you're on the move.
So the question you need to ask yourself is why are you still doing things the older, slower, and more expensive way when there is another method available to you? You have the ability to adapt, saving yourself both time and valuable resources. eSigning has been market tested, it has shown its reliability, for other parties both across town, across the country, or across the globe requiring a fraction of the time and costs.
Now is the time to take a look at your processes and decide, do you want to operate like those firms stuck in the past? Or do you want to take a step and be the legal practice of the future?