Are electronically signed contracts valid? What the statutes actually say

In the United States, the European Union and the United Kingdom, a contract cannot be thrown out solely because it was signed on a screen, and that has been the written rule since around 2000. When a client asks whether the agreement they signed on their phone "actually counts," that is the short answer, and the interesting part is the conditions attached to the yes. This page describes what the statutes say, with dates and links so you can check them. It is not advice about your contract; laws are specific to a place; North is not legal counsel.

The United States: ESIGN and UETA

The federal Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act, enacted on 30 June 2000, sets the general rule in its first section: a signature, contract, or other record relating to a transaction may not be denied legal effect, validity, or enforceability solely because it is in electronic form.

Its definition of an electronic signature is broad on purpose: an electronic sound, symbol, or process, attached to or logically associated with a contract or other record and executed or adopted by a person with the intent to sign the record. A typed name qualifies. So does a click, if the person clicking meant it as a signature.

The Act lists things it does not cover, and none of them is a design contract: wills and testamentary trusts, family-law matters such as adoption and divorce, most of the Uniform Commercial Code, court documents, and a set of notices (utility cut-offs, foreclosure and eviction, insurance cancellation, hazardous materials).

Alongside ESIGN sits the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act, a model law from the Uniform Law Commission that individual states enact into their own statutes; it carries the same core rule at state level. We could not verify from the Commission's page today how many states have enacted it or which have not, so this page does not print a count. If you need to know your state's position, the state statute is the thing to read.

The European Union: eIDAS

Regulation (EU) No 910/2014, usually called eIDAS, applied from 1 July 2016 and, being a regulation rather than a directive, applies directly in every member state.

Article 25(1) is the rule a freelancer needs: an electronic signature shall not be denied legal effect and admissibility as evidence in legal proceedings solely on the grounds that it is in an electronic form or that it does not meet the requirements for qualified electronic signatures.

The regulation defines three grades. An electronic signature is data in electronic form attached to or logically associated with other data and used by the signatory to sign (Article 3(10)). An advanced electronic signature meets the extra requirements of Article 26, which tie it uniquely to the signer and make later changes detectable. A qualified electronic signature is an advanced one created with a qualified device and based on a qualified certificate, and under Article 25(2) it has the equivalent legal effect of a handwritten signature.

What that means in practice: a typed or clicked signature on a contract is the first grade. It cannot be thrown out for being electronic. It does not automatically get the handwritten-equivalence that the qualified grade carries, so if it is ever disputed, its weight comes from the evidence around it rather than from a presumption. Most freelance contracts are never disputed, and for the ones that are, the evidence is the whole game.

The United Kingdom

Two texts. Section 7 of the Electronic Communications Act 2000 makes an electronic signature incorporated into or logically associated with an electronic communication admissible in evidence on the question of the authenticity and integrity of that communication, and defines an electronic signature as so much of anything in electronic form as is incorporated into or associated with the communication and purports to be used by the person creating it to authenticate it. The section was amended in 2016 to sit alongside eIDAS, which the UK retained after leaving the EU.

The clearer statement came from the Law Commission's report on the electronic execution of documents, published on 4 September 2019: an electronic signature is capable in law of being used to execute a document, including a deed, provided that the person signing the document intends to authenticate the document and any formalities relating to execution of that document are satisfied. Deeds keep their witnessing requirements; an ordinary services contract does not have any.

What makes a screen signature worth something

Read the three regimes together and the same four things carry the weight. This paragraph is dull and it is the useful one.

Identity: some evidence of who signed. An email address the signer controlled at the time is ordinary evidence; a name typed into an open web page by anyone who had the link is thin.

Intent: evidence that the person meant this act as a signature of this document, not a general presence in a thread. A dedicated signing step, with the document in front of them, is the point.

Record: the document as signed, unchanged, kept somewhere both sides can find it later.

Time: when the signing happened, recorded by something other than the signer's memory.

A signature that carries all four is the kind that holds up in the rare case it is examined. A signature that carries none is a name in a PDF.

How North's signing works against that list

Stated as mechanism, with no claim about enforceability anywhere, because that depends on the place and the facts. The contract is drafted alongside the proposal and shown to the client after they accept. To sign, the client verifies their email address once, by a link sent to that address. The signature is bound to that address and to the moment it was made. The signed document becomes the record for everything that follows, and if the terms need changing later, the change is issued as a new version with the old one kept. Identity, intent, record, time.

The contract itself is yours. North drafts it and can explain what a clause does; whether a particular clause would hold in a particular court is a question for a lawyer, and where it matters, it is worth twenty minutes of one.