Electronic signatures have been valid for contracts in most of the world for over twenty years. What people get wrong is not the law; it is the difference between a signature that looks signed and one that can be shown to have been signed by a particular person at a particular time.
The three questions a signed document must answer
- Who signed? — the signer's identity was checked in some way at the moment of signing.
- What did they sign? — the document has not changed since; any alteration is detectable.
- When? — a time that does not depend on the signer's own computer clock.
A JPEG of a signature pasted onto a PDF answers none of these. A signature captured through a proper request answers all three.
How an e-sign request works in Herarx
Start from a case's Files tab or from E-sign → New. Choose the document — an uploaded PDF, a document generated from the case, or a blank page — and add recipients. Place fields on the pages: signature, initials, name, date, short text, a choice between options. Each field belongs to a recipient. Recipients can sign in a set order.
Each recipient receives a link and must confirm a one-time code sent to their email before they can see the document. That is the identity check — the email address the request was sent to, proven at the time of signing. They review every page, complete their fields, and sign.
What comes back
When the last signer finishes, Herarx seals the PDF. The output includes the completed document, an audit certificate listing each signer, the email they verified, the timestamp of each step and the sending account, and a seal that makes any later change to the file detectable. The signed PDF and its certificate are filed back into the case, encrypted at rest like every other file.
What e-signatures are not for
Some documents in some jurisdictions still require a wet signature or a witness in the room — wills, certain deeds, some property transfers. Check before you send. For everything else — engagement letters, tenancy agreements, consent forms, settlement terms, NDAs — an e-sign request is faster, easier to prove and impossible to lose.
A habit worth adopting
Generate the document from the case rather than uploading a copy. The tenant's name, the address, the dates and the amounts come from fields you have already filled, so the document you send is the document the case describes — and when the signed copy comes back, it is attached to the row that produced it.
