Legalities of esignature

Question

I am creating an app where there will be many forms that have a signature. I am planning on using AngualarJS SignIt! on top of Rails to capture the signature. From there I will store it in a "signatures" table that will be attached to the person who signed it and the form it was signed on. I have a two part question:

1. Is this a good flow to go about capturing a signature and storing it?
2. What are the legalities of signed documents on a web page that I may need to be aware of? What information will make it legally binding and hold up in court?

Any help is much appreciated.

Answer 1

I'm a programmer working with an intellectual property attorney to develop an attorney-based website. According to what he has told me,

Two or more actions on the web count as a legally binding action.

This could be a click and a confirmation, a signature and a "submit" action, you get the idea.

DISCLAIMER: This information is only valid for the United States (as far as I know), and for educational purposes only, do not trust it, etc...

My advice: build your application and then worry about the legal issues later. Those problems are good problems.

Answer 2

My (partial) opinion is that instead of rolling your own you can just use DocuSign and get an IFRAME url for document with data and signatures and then display it whatever way you want. I am not a Ruby programmer, but here is code in Node, Java, Python, C# and PHP that can give you an idea of how to get a doc signed via DocuSign API:

http://iodocs.docusign.com/APIWalkthrough/embeddedSigning