Making sure your paperwork is all in order might be one of the most exhausting aspects of doing business. Contracts govern the terms of all professional engagements, which is why contract management is an essential process for any organization. Even in your personal life, you have to sign contracts, whether it’s a lease agreement for your rental apartment or a power of attorney to appoint your agents.
Contracts are dense documents that can be very confusing for people who aren’t familiar with the legal jargon they contain. It’s difficult enough to read a contract through with any clarity, so imagine how confusing drafting one for yourself could be.
Thankfully, online services like LawDistrict can rescue you from the stress of contract management. These services will help you create online legal documents with much less hassle. Take your contract management to the next level with virtual contracts drawn up from error-free, foolproof templates.
Why You Need Virtual Contracts
Let’s be honest—no one really enjoys paperwork. So, finding a useful tool to help create legal documents and streamline your contract management processes can be an excellent gift for efficiency and productivity. And we certainly need all the help we can get!
Research published by World Commerce & Contracting in 2021 found that 90% of professionals found contracts difficult or impossible to understand. In another round of research in 2022, 89% of organizations said they had ineffective contract management methods.
With so many professionals and companies turning their noses up at contract management, an urgent solution is needed. Virtual contracts can address some of the glaring shortcomings of traditional ink-and-paper contracts.
Let’s look at the top three reasons to implement virtual contract signings:
Faster Turnaround
Virtual contracts can be drafted, shared with multiple signers, and returned with digital signatures, all within a single day. Paper contracts, which need to be physically mailed to each relevant party, typically take much longer to do the rounds and come back with official signatures.
Improved Security
A paper contract is quite vulnerable to tampering via methods like scanning, reprinting, and photocopying. In contrast, it is much more difficult to make changes to a digital contract that bears the e-signatures of all parties. Every stakeholder has a copy of the document, so there is much less chance of an unauthorized clause or alteration making it into the contract’s final draft.
Lower Costs
Virtual methods can be much more cost-effective for your organization than traditional contracts. You will save on overhead expenses like paper, printing, and packaging costs while drafting legal documents.
Also, mistakes in contract management can lead to costly delays and errors. It’s safer to rely on a service that provides error-free legal documents online and effective contract management software to reduce the odds of your organization facing losses due to contract mismanagement.
Three Simple Steps to Sign a Virtual Contract
There’s a strong case to be made for implementing virtual contracts for your legal documents. They are easy to use and will simplify your record-keeping processes and eliminate the complications of printing, scanning, and delivering paperwork. With the right contract management software, you can easily switch from paper to digital contracts.
Signing a virtual contract is a simple process that involves three steps:
Download An E-Signing Tool
The tools used to share and sign digital contracts are called e-signature apps. They can also be referred to as contract management software.
These tools are extremely valuable for sharing important legal documents online. Users can create a digital signature protected by cryptography and serial identification numbers, which adds an additional layer of security to all sensitive documents.
Prepare The Contract
When you have chosen an e-signature app, upload your contract to it. Before doing that, ensure that your contract is legally binding and agreed upon by all parties. Using prepared templates for online legal documents helps achieve consensus from all stakeholders on the contract’s final draft.
Include all the terms and clauses expected in the contract and create spaces, called sign tags, for each party to put their signature. When all these elements are included and every stakeholder is satisfied, your virtual contract is ready for signing.
The last step is to use your e-signature app to share the final draft of the contract over email. With most of the popular signature tools, such as Docusign and Adobe Acrobat Reader, you don’t need to worry about whether recipients already have the same app. The email will arrive in their inboxes with instructions to guide them through adding their digital signatures to the document. After signing, the final contract containing the signatures is shared with all parties.
Congratulations! By following the steps mentioned above, you’ve successfully learned how to sign a virtual contract. Handling online legal documents becomes much simpler once you master how to create, share, and sign virtual contracts.
