Electronic signature law, explained

In the United States, electronic signatures have been legally equivalent to ink since 2000, when the federal ESIGN Act took effect alongside UETA at state level. In the EU, eIDAS does the same job and goes further, defining three tiers of signature with different evidential weight. The practical answer to "is this binding?" is almost always yes — but the law attaches conditions, and the conditions are where agreements actually fail.

Four requirements recur across every one of these regimes. The signer must intend to sign. They must consent to doing business electronically. The signature must be attributable to them, which in practice means you can show who signed and how you know. And the resulting record must be retainable and reproducible by everyone entitled to it. A platform can capture all four automatically; a scanned image pasted into a PDF captures none of them.

The exclusions matter more than most people expect. Wills and testamentary trusts, many family-law filings, certain court documents, and some notices affecting a person's home or utilities are commonly carved out — and the carve-outs differ by state and by country. Cross-border agreements inherit the stricter of the two regimes in practice, which is why eIDAS tiers turn up in contracts that never touch Europe.

The guides below cover each of these in turn: what the statutes say, which tier you need, what happens when a signature is challenged, and where the exceptions are.