Contracts
Electronic signature
DocuSign configured inside your own account, linking contracts already out for signature, and wet-signature evidence.
Your DocuSign account, not ours
The integration is registered by you, inside your own DocuSign account. Envelopes never leave it, and they stay under your retention policy and your legal relationship with DocuSign. The cost is a handful of setup steps in your DocuSign administration screens.
- 1
Register an application in DocuSign
This produces an integration key, a user id and an account id, plus an RSA key pair.
- 2
Enter them under Settings → Signing
The private key is encrypted at rest. Choose the environment carefully: getting it wrong sends real contracts to a sandbox.
- 3
Grant consent, once
This is the step everybody misses, and the resulting error explains nothing. It has its own block on the screen, its own link, and a button that checks with DocuSign rather than taking your word for it.
Contracts that already exist
Most organisations adopting this already have contracts out for signature or signed years ago. Linking an existing envelope is what makes those recordable — re-sending would mean asking signatories to sign the same document twice, so in practice they would simply never be recorded. A completed envelope has its signed file pulled and filed immediately, so linking history produces the evidence rather than a reference to it.
Contracts that predate any electronic signing are uploaded directly as executed, wet-signed documents with no template and no envelope.
Wet signatures
An electronic signature being legally binding is not the end of the question
Immigration authorities have refused electronically signed contracts and demanded a hand-signed original. So how each party signed is a stored, queryable fact — because *do we hold a hand-signed copy of this?* has a visa appointment attached and cannot be answered from a date.
- Where somebody outside has demanded a wet original, that requirement is recorded with its reason, because it outlives whoever handled the case — and it blocks electronic sending, since sending anyway produces a document that looks complete and is refused at the counter.
- The requirement is satisfied by evidence, not by a claim: an executed document on file whose method is wet. An agreement merely marked as wet-signed with no scan attached is exactly the state discovered too late.
- An executed document must say how it was signed. Signed, somehow is not an answer.
How status stays current
Envelope status is polled every fifteen minutes rather than relying on callbacks. Callbacks are a paid add-on on some DocuSign plans, and a missed one leaves a contract reported as awaiting signature forever.
Signing refuses rather than degrades
Elsewhere a missing integration falls back to logging, because a notification must not fail the approval that queued it. A contract that was silently not sent is a contract somebody believes is with the signatory, so this one fails loudly with the reason.
Documents are rendered, not exported
PDFs are produced through a real browser engine, because Arabic joins its letters and runs right to left, and Georgian, Thai and CJK need shaping no pure-JavaScript PDF library performs. A mis-shaped legal instrument is worse than none. The preview, the printed copy and the envelope all come from the same markup, so what somebody prints for a wet signature cannot drift from what is sent for an electronic one.