Technology is often touted as being new, advanced, exciting, fresh, and so on. But when a technology is crowned as the latest new new thing, valid concerns are often raised: will it last? Is it legal? Can everyone involved in the process use it successfully? What are the unknown unknowns as Donald Rumsfeld would say?
Due to this common fear of new technology, its adoption rate is often much slower than many people would like.
For digital signatures, these issues cause many potential users to shy away from the technology, citing vague concerns about the legality of electronic or digital signatures. Their concerns linger despite the many laws and regulations which make it clear that online signatures, especially digital signatures, are perfectly legal and reliable.
Because of these issues, it was newsworthy last week when Judge Deborah Stevens Modica, the Supervising Judge of the Criminal Court in Queens County, New York, ruled in a criminal case that online signatures are “…no longer novel.”
Or to put it another way, the big news is that electronic signatures are not news. I certainly believe this, and so does attorney Michael Dillon, who points out that the first time an electronic signature was recognized by a US court was in 1869!
As he recently wrote in HuffPost Tech, “In Howley v. Whipple (1869) the New Hampshire Supreme Court...determined that ‘It makes no difference whether [the telegraph] operator writes with a steel pen an inch long attached to an ordinary penholder, or whether his pen be a copper wire a thousand miles long.’”
Bottom line for you and me: when the doubters are worried that the “new technology” of electronic or digital signatures is not trustworthy, you can assure them that the technology is safe, secure, and held by the courts to be “no longer novel.”
The real question is, when will you choose to start enjoying the many benefits of digital signatures?
ps. You can hear me live on my upcoming AIIM webinar. Please join us!