Imagine if the Founding Fathers of the United States had iPads when they were signing the Declaration of Independence or The US Constitution. Rather than pulling out a big quill pen and dipping it in ink, each delegate could have walked up to the desk and signed the document with their finger. In fact, they could have passed the iPad around to each other for signing rather than all walking up to the document. That would have helped Ben Franklin, since he had gout and it was tough for him to stand up and walk.
If John Hancock and Thomas Jefferson used DocuSign Ink to sign an electronic version of The Declaration of Independence, not only would the iPad have captured their signature, but it would have put a time and date stamp along with the GPS coordinates of where they signed. All of that information, including the document, would go to a secure storage area in the cloud and be retained.
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I had a conversation with an attorney the other day and she was telling me how her law firm is getting Apple iPads for all the attorneys. She said there was a lot of resistance, at first, from her IT department. That’s been the case with many law firms, but improved productivity has won the day.
In fact, according to the 2011 ILTA/InsideLegal Technology Purchasing Survey, which examined the purchasing trends of law firms with 50+ Attorneys, 25% of respondents said that the iPad would be one of the major technology purchases over the next 12 months. 11% of firms had already purchased iPads for their attorneys and 55% reported providing IT support for employees who purchase and use their personal devices.
Many law firms and other businesses are concerned about leaking the most sensitive information in their business. As with many organizations, law firms use documents to store client and case materials. Some of them are in a case management system, but many are on people’s laptops, desktops, mobile devices and file servers. I asked the attorney what would happen if those documents got out of the company and into the hands of other law firms, the media or other businesses? She said it would be devastating. Letting her client correspondence, legal briefs and strategies out would ruin them. Their clients would lose all trust in them and it would most likely put them out of business.
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Everyone loves paper. It’s everywhere. We print ink on it. We read words on it. We draw pictures on it. We wrap food in it. Unfortunately we also seem to cling to it for our business processes.
It amazes me how many times I do business that involves paper documents. Don’t get me wrong, paper still has a lot of great value for certain things, but moving it around as part of a business process isn’t one of them. In today’s world, typing, printing, reading, signing, scanning, faxing and filing paper documents is slow, cumbersome and fraught with a lot of risk.
Document management systems have been around for over 30 years. They began as simple repositories for scanned images and then for electronic documents. Back in those days it was common for people to create documents with typewriters, with offset printing techniques or write them by hand. Today every document is created on a computer.
Since business documents start on a computer, why not keep them electronic throughout a business process?
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It’s amazing how many documents I have to sign. Whether it’s buying food at a store or signing a contract, I’m always signing something. A lot of retail stores have signature pads, so no paper is involved in the transaction. When it comes to other businesses, I’m still signing a piece of paper.
And that’s where most business processes hit a speed bump.
Here’s a great example. Last week I had to go to the doctor’s office. The person at the front desk asked me some questions and updated my records in their system. Then she printed a HIPAA statement and a form so I could authorize them to bill my insurance company. She asked me to sign the two documents. I read them and signed them with a pen. She took the two documents, put them into a scanner and pressed the Scan button. She attached the scanned pages to my records and put the papers into a filing cabinet. I asked her why she kept the paper documents since she had the scanned ones in the system. She said “Just in case I need them.” I assume that she may need to send my scanned authorization form to my insurance company so they have a record too.
This is an example of an electronic business process that gets held up because someone has to print a document for signature. Imagine if you are doing this 10, 50 or 100 times a day. That’s a lot of paper and a lot of time.
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This past week I was traveling and a lot of business came up that required my signature. That’s good, but signing documents the old fashioned way is not. When you are on the road, printing a document, signing it with a pen and then either scanning and emailing or faxing it is not convenient. Most everything I do for business uses the cloud and so should my transactions.
Early in the week, I had to sign a nondisclosure agreement. Anyone doing business is used to that. I needed to get this in place quickly before visiting a prospective customer. The customer’s legal department sent me the nondisclosure using DocuSign. I got a link in my email, read through the short document and signed it on my phone. Since I’ve used DocuSign before, my electronic signature was already in the system. One click and it was off to the next signer. It took me longer to read the document than the time it took for the whole transaction. Everyone got a signed and sealed document in email once we were finished.
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