An agreement does not end when it is signed

Most electronic signature products are built around one moment: somebody clicks, a signature appears, everybody gets an email saying it is done. The product is finished at the point the agreement begins.

For the business that sent it, that is the least interesting moment in the agreement’s life. The work is before it — getting the document right — and long after it: the renewal nobody diarised, the notice period that ran out in March, the stamp a court will want to see, and the question somebody asks in three years about what exactly was agreed.

Eight stages, not one

We drew the whole life of an agreement before building any more of it, because a product built around one moment keeps adding features to that moment. Laid out end to end, it has eight stages.

1. Start with the paper — answer a few questions and have it drafted, upload a PDF, pick it from Drive, take a starter off the shelf, or draft it together in the shared word processor.
2. Prepare — parties, signing order, fields and expiry.
3. Send, three ways — by link, from inside the app, or in person.
4. Sign at the table — everybody in one room, on one device, each leaving with their own proof.
5. Sealed for themself — each person holds a receipt of their own act the moment they sign, before anybody else has.
6. Sealed for everyone — the completed record, hash-chained and sealed once the last party acts.
7. Verify, forever — anybody checks it without an account, a key, or a subscription.
8. Manage and renew — the calendar, the renewal and the formalities an agreement carries after it is signed.

Five ways to start, because documents arrive five ways

A signature product that only accepts an uploaded PDF has quietly decided that the document was somebody else’s problem. In practice an agreement arrives in one of five states: a lawyer’s finished PDF, a file already in the company’s storage, a standard document the business uses every week, a draft two people are still arguing over, or nothing at all — just the knowledge that one is needed.

The last of those is the case most tools cannot help with, and the guided documents exist for it: answer questions, and the agreement is drafted with the parties and fields already in place.

Signing at a table is not a remote ceremony with the laptop turned round

Plenty of agreements are still signed with everybody in the room — a vehicle sale, a new starter on their first morning, a tenancy handed over with the keys. Most signature software handles this by pretending it is remote: email each person a link and have them open it on their phone while sitting at the same table.

Signing in person is a mode of its own here. The device passes round, each party signs in turn, and — the part that matters — each leaves with a receipt of their own act, countersigned by Rutba at the moment they signed. That receipt has a post of its own, because it changes what a signer is holding when they walk out.

The signature is the moment an agreement starts costing attention. Software that stops there has stopped at the easy part.

After the signature

The manage stage is where the difference shows. An agreement carries dates — a renewal, a notice window, an expiry — and a signed PDF in a folder carries none of them in any form software can act on. Rutba Sign keeps them against the agreement, so renewals are a list rather than a surprise.

It also carries formalities. Where a jurisdiction wants a stamp, a seal or a notary as well as signatures, the formality is declared on the agreement and has to be satisfied before it is sent or before it is sealed. How that desk works, and what it costs, is its own part of this series.