Electronic signatures are handy for personal shopping, but perhaps less so for your arbitration agreements, say Gary Gansle and Nisha Patel of Squire Patton Boggs. They say a case last month out of the California Court of Appeal demonstrates the dangers of relying solely on electronic documents, as the court refused to enforce an employer’s arbitration agreement because there wasn’t enough evidence that it was the employee’s actual signature on it.
“While the Court admitted that an electronic signature has the same legal effect as a handwritten signature, it stated that any writing must still be authenticated,” say Gansle and Patel. In this case, the employer didn’t have the measures in place to prove it was actually the employee who signed the document, and the employee said he didn’t recall signing it. The employer did have a human resource system wherein each user had a unique identification and password, but the judge said this wasn’t enough to demonstrate authenticity.
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