Search Results for: signature stamp

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Making a Useful Signature Stamp

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At PDF for Lawyers, Ernie the Attorney provides a great tutorital on creating a digital signature in Adobe Acrobat. The problem with using a digital signature in Acrobat is that most people don’t understand them. In addtion to your name, the digital signature contains other information that verifies that you signed the document and that it has not been changed since.

Ernie explains:

A signature, digital or not, has to satisfy two elements: (1) non-repudiability, and (2) acceptance by the receiving party.  In other words, the point of signing a document is so the recipient knows it’s from you, and that you can’t deny it’s from you (i.e. you can’t repudiate authorship of the document).  Digital signatures are far superior to regular signatures in this arena.  Where they fail miserably is in the ‘acceptance’ part.
Because digital signatures are not familiar to most people they freak out if they see a bunch of numbers where they’re used to seeing indecipherable human scrawl.  So, how to remedy this problem?
The quick and dirty fix is to do what I outline in that blurb I mentioned a few sentences ago. Just create a stamp and slap that on the document you want to ‘sign.’  It won’t be secure like a real digital signature (and if you want to repudiate it you can say your secretary exceeded her authority and stamped it without your knowledge).  But, let’s say you’re a fair-minded, by-the-rules kind of guy (or gal).  Is there another option?

Fortunately Ernie has solved this problem. Simply go to his post and follow his few simple steps to create a digital signature with an appearance that won’t freak people out.

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Signature Stamp v. Digital Signature

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Earlier today I posted about a tutorial demonstrating how to use create a signature stamp on a document. Often I hear people refer to stamps such as these as digital signatures. In reality, however, these signature stamps are not digital signatures.

A digital signature is actually something much more. Digital signatures use encryption to authenticate a document. The ABA has a good article on digital signatures and how they work.

The key thing to remember is that a digital signature has nothing to do with how you sign your name. Instead, it is a method to authenticate that a document came from you. A signature stamp, on the other hand, allows you to apply your physical signature to an electronic document in the same manner that you could stamp a piece of paper with a stamp created from your signature. In both instances, the stamp does not prove that the document came from you. Instead, it just proves that the document came from someone with possession of your signature stamp.

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Creating a Transparent Signature Stamp

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I have briefly blogged before about creating a transparent signature stamp. I have also referred you to Rick Borstein’s excellent post about creating a stamp to use in Adobe Acrobat.
For the third time in less than a week, however, I have found a great little video tutorial that explains how to create a transparent signature stamp in a Word document. This document can then, of course, be converted to a PDF if that is something you need to do.

I have used the method described in this video for several months. The signature stamp, when combined by my virtual fax program, allows me to draft letters and fax them without ever printing a copy of the letter.

The video was created by Finis Price at TechnoEsq. You can see it here.
[quicktime width=”320″ height=”240″]http://www.technoesq.com/wp-content/themes/connections/img/videos/TranspSig.mov[/quicktime]

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A Primer on Electronic Signatures

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TechnoEsq has a great post in which he discusses the methods of signing electronic documents. As he explains:

Contracts are now signed electronically, emails are frequently used for communication between counsel and clients, pleadings in federal court are even electronically signed and filed. Obviously, such a paradigm shift is necessary in the modern era and makes today’s world work, from ATM and credit card purchases to purchasing automobile insurance online. From a legal perspective, however, there are many different forms of electronic signatures. The term is used interchangeably to describe three very distinct means of signing a document electronically:

1. Signature Stamp (or scanned version of a signature)

2. Electronic Signature (used in the federal court system)

3. Digital Signature (encryption used to authenticate a document).

This article explains the three forms of electronic signatures and assist in their creation.

I urge you to review this article to find out the uses for each of these three types of signatures as well as how to create and use each of them.

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More Thoughts on Digital Signatures

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I have written multiple times about using digital signatures. As I have pointed out before, however, what I am referring to in my posts is actually just a picture of my signature added to a PDF file. A true digital signature is different and includes security and verification protocols. Recently Adobe Acrobat hosted a webinar on using and deploying digital signatures.

Unfortunately, most of the conversation was over my head. It looks like I was not the only one. Ernie the Attorney reports at PDF for Lawyers:

The other day I attended a free online webinar by some Adobe gurus who dove deep into the arcana of digital signatures.  After the dive I realized that I had a mild case of the bends.

Here’s the problem.  Like most people who don’t live in an ‘enterprise world,’ where there’s a rigorous document review cycle, I just want to sometimes slap a ‘digital signature’ on a document and not have the recipient feel like I’ve sent them some bizarre totemic glyph.
My needs are simple.  Apparently, true digital signatures are not.
Ernie correctly notes that people are not familiar with digital signatures and most do not know what to do when they see one. As Ernie explains:
A signature, digital or not, has to satisfy two elements: (1) non-repudiability, and (2) acceptance by the receiving party.  In other words, the point of signing a document is so the recipient knows it’s from you, and that you can’t deny it’s from you (i.e. you can’t repudiate authorship of the document).  Digital signatures are far superior to regular signatures in this arena.  Where they fail miserably is in the ‘acceptance’ part.
Because digital signatures are not familiar to most people they freak out if they see a bunch of numbers where they’re used to seeing indecipherable human scrawl.  So, how to remedy this problem?
The quick and dirty fix is to do what I outline in that blurb I mentioned a few sentences ago. Just create a stamp and slap that on the document you want to ‘sign.’  It won’t be secure like a real digital signature (and if you want to repudiate it you can say your secretary exceeded her authority and stamped it without your knowledge).  But, let’s say you’re a fair-minded, by-the-rules kind of guy (or gal).  Is there another option?
Turns out there is (although this wasn’t covered in the Adobe webinar; I had to find it myself using a snorkle).

Check out Ernie’s entire post to see a simple way of incorporating both a normal looking signature and a digital signature in your electronic documents.

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Signatures in Acrobat

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Rick Borstein at Acrobat for Legal Professionals has a great post on creating and using a transparent signature stamp. This is something I do fairly often when generating a letter that I am sending via fax. I simply draft the letter, apply a stamp of my signature, and fax the letter using a virtual fax service. Thus, I can send a letter and not have to kill any trees to do it.

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My Tip for the Day: Don’t Create Stupid Rules

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My wife and I are in the process of refinancing some rental property that we own. Because we have all of our information in a digital format, we were able to send our financial info, tax info, etc., to the bank electronically. In response, the bank sent us an application that they wanted us to complete and sign. The app was emailed to use. My wife completed and we each simply stamped our signatures on the application and returned it to the bank. I am sure that this was not what the bank anticipated when they asked for our signatures, but I wasn’t terribly concerned about this.

This morning, we get an email from the bank. They can’t process our loan applications because we didn’t initial a line that appears just above our signatures. Yes, that is right. They have no problems with the signatures. But they must have actual written initials on the page before they can actually do anything with our application.

When the loan officer was asked for the reason for this. He admitted that he didn’t know why this was required. He just knew that it was.

I want to emphasize that this was an initial on a separate page to verify the info there, or anything like that. No, it was initials directly above our signatures.

The point I want to make here is that when you create rules, you should make sure that the rules have some rational basis or justification. Don’t create rules that must be blindly followed simply because someone once thought up the rule.

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Simple Certified Mail

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I do almost all of my simple administrative tasks myself. Mostly because I try to automate them to make the tasks simple and fast to perform. There is one thing, however, that I hate doing: certified mail. It is a pain to deal with and I always delegate that task to my assistant. I have recently discovered a new service that may make certified mail as easy to handle as other routine tasks. This service, called Simple Certified Mail, automates much of the process. Recently I was able to find out more about this service from Keith Pickholz, Marketing Director at Simple Certified Mail.  An interview with Charles Crutchfield, the founder of Simple Certified Mail appears below.

What is SimpleCertifiedMail.com?

SimpleCertifiedMail.com is an easy-to-use, web-based service that dramatically speeds up and simplifies the preparation and management of Certified Mail, which is a key process at many law firms. In fact, customers report 75% improvements in productivity when using SimpleCertifiedMail.com.

Tell me more about SimpleCertifiedMail.com. Why is it better?

SimpleCertifiedMail.com improves every step of the Certified Mail process.  Let’s start with preparing and sending Certified Mail.

With SimpleCertifiedMail.com, there are no manual forms to fill out, or special forms to put through your printer. And there’s no need to apply stamps or use a postal meter. You simply login to our service, enter the recipient address, and select whether the item is being sent with or without Return Receipt (Electronic). SimpleCertifiedMail.com prints the address and the electronic postage, along with the appropriate Certified Mail bar codes (what we call a Certified Mail “label”) on standard paper from any printer. Everything you need to mail the item, and the whole process takes 30 seconds.

Once you’ve printed the Certified Mail “label” you just slip the Certified Mail label, and your document, into one of the special window envelopes we supply for free, and drop in any mailbox. That’s it for mailing.


Sounds like it saves a lot of time. But what about getting Proof of Delivery?

Good question. Of course, the reason people use Certified Mail is to get signed Proofs of Delivery. SimpleCertifiedMail.com eliminates the old-fashioned green cards, what the US Post Office calls the PS3811. There are lots of problems with green cards: wondering whether they have been signed; waiting for their return; and then having to file the cards to make sure they don’t get lost. Ten years ago the Post Office developed a more modern system, called Return Receipt (Electronic) that returns the Signature and Proof of Delivery as a PDF file, and carries the same legal clout, but normally you have to go to the Post Office counter to request it for every single Certified Mail item.

SimpleCertifiedMail.com plugs you right into Return Receipt (Electronic) without leaving your desk. When one of our Certified Mail letters is delivered, the Mail Carrier collects the signature from the recipient on a form, and it is posted as a PDF file on our web site the very next morning. So you get the signature immediately, you can print out the PDF; you can save it to your case file; and you can leave it on our servers where we maintain all your records for seven years.

The rest of the interview appears below the break