Brief Primer of E-Signatures: How Did Florida End Up on the Cutting Edge?
Florida Arbitration Law . com:
Few businesspeople or lawyers recognize that a sent email can constitute a formal contract. Florida is one of the few states which has a statute on point, thus practitioners need to be wary of the significance of emailed “signatures” and agreements. It’s important to realize that an e-contract — and therefore an “e-arbitration clause” or “e-xculpatory clause” — can be as valid as their ink and paper brethren.
Here’s a quick primer.
The scant case law nationwide has acknowledge four e-signature scenarios: (1) automatic signatures (done by your email program), (2) prompted signatures (also done by your email program), (3) intentionally typed signatures, done by the sender, and (4) uploaded signatures (done by your email program).
The statute of frauds typically require a writing and a signature by a party against whom enforcement is sought. Common law, in many jurisdictions, refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of electronic contracts and signatures as legally binding. The concern, of course, was fraud but it has become fairly well acknowledged that a signature can be faked on paper just as easily as it can on an e-document.
The Federal E-Sign Act give the same status to electronic records and signatures as to their paper counterparts. The full title is the “Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act” and is found at 15 USC 7001 (link above). To this end, Florida is one of the few states which adopted the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act (UETA) but applies prospectively only to parties which agree to contract electronically (judged by the context). Florida’s version of the UETA is Florida Statute 668.50. There’s little to no case law on Florida’s UETA, with the exception of the “highly unusual foreclosure case” of Cicoria v. Gazi, which drops a reference to the UETA and faxed documents in…