Is an editable PDF over email the same as a signature?

[Bruce P.]

Hi, a friend of mine is using Bigger Pocket's editable forms for house hacking roommates. Does a new tenant roommate filling that out in the various signature fields and sending it back over email basically constitute the same legal agreement as if they signed their own signature with a pen? There's all kinds of e-signing services these days like Docusign and it seems the same in principle, but just curious as there seems to be so much minutiae with respect to real estate laws.

[Michael D.]

@Bruce Park

I’m not quite sure what kind of signing you are describing exactly, and in any event I can’t give specific legal advice but I can talk generalities. E-signed leases are enforceable generally, but one still needs to be able to attribute the signature to a particular person -the signer- and overall make sure that there is evidentiary support that the signer is indeed who they say they are, in case they try to deny it later. This is where services like DocuSign become handy because it locks the documents and tracks various attributes like where it was signed, the IP address and a lot of other info which could be used in court as evidence of who the signer was. It could cut both ways by the way: if I sign a document for my wife at home while she is at work, one could present evidence that it wasn’t her and thus the signature ineffective. So the bottom line is you have to assess your own risk tolerance.

If it was me, I would not be inclined to accept someone just typing in their name and treating it as a signature, if that’s what you are describing.