We are all getting used to checking a box and putting our name in a text field to create a contract with an airline, a hosting company, or a software download. However, for some reason I am still asking clients to sign our contracts for website development on paper, and send me a scan. Few complain about this procedure, but I am personally thinking: what am I doing, doing this the old fashion way?! Signing contracts digitally would be faster, more convenient for clients and for me, and easier to store. So to me it appears to be time to start creating some contract agreement online that clients can read, then print their name, and mark a box I AGREE WITH THIS CONTRACT AND BY PRINTING MY NAME I AGREE TO SIGNING THIS, or something like that. I would record their IP, browser data, and time of signing. If I really want to ensure their identity, I could link this to OpenID and require them to log in with their e-mail so that I can ensure that they are logged in on an existing e-mail account. Sounds OK to me. My question is: is this practice becoming a standard practice in professional IT services? Are you (as a professional) doing this? If you are, how do clients react? Any drawbacks doing this? EDIT:This question is not about the legal aspects. It is about common practices among programmers and web-development companies, and what clients think of this.
Do you sign contracts digitally or still on paper? And what do clients think?
contract
It's definitely not a standard practice.Ignoring the legal aspects, most larger companies that purchase IT services are organized with the expectation that there will be a paper contract.  There are groups of people that review the terms of the contract.  There are groups of people that review the cost.  And quite possibly there is someone else with signature authority that has to actually sign the contract.  For that sort of workflow, having a paper document to pass around makes everyone's life easier.  And that's before considering the possibility that the customer requests a change to the terms of the contractDigital signatures make much more sense for business to consumer transactions where the consumer is the one reviewing the contract (or, more likely, blindly accepting it), the consumer is the one that reviews the cost, and the consumer is the one that clicks the signature button because there is no need for any sort of workflow and no realistic option for the customer to request a change in the terms of the contract.  