Dropbox

As one of the more increasingly popular cloud storage apps out there, Dropbox is a highly intuitive solution for storing your files online. Available through a desktop client, web app and mobile app, Dropbox allows you to stay connected to your files wherever you are. Upload your files through one device and it’ll automatically sync with the cloud and update across all platforms. It even offers support for team-based cloud storage, allowing multiple team member access to one central Dropbox, allowing for ease of use when it comes to managing collaborative processes.

Basecamp

The quintessential project management solution, Basecamp allows for multiple teams and entire companies to coordinate projects. You can create discussions, text documents, set calendar events and upload whatever notes, resources and materials your team might need for a project. It’s a one-stop solution that provides creative teams with a workflow to efficiently and effectively work right out of the cloud.

Evernote

While Dropbox simply allows you to store files online, Evernote lets you create them. It’s Google Docs but with a much greater emphasis on mobile devices and tablets. Evernote gives you the tools to create notes, take pictures and record memos, all while uploading it to the cloud. Also similar to Dropbox, Evernote has features that allows for entire teams to operate out of one notebook, letting everyone share and collaborate with ease.

OneReceipt

Great for monitoring company expenses, OneReceipt lets you upload all your receipts online so you remain hassle and paper free. Even better, with everything on the cloud, it gives you quick and easy access to your expenses whenever you need them.

CardMunch

Developed by LinkedIn, this simple iPhone app allows you to scan business cards with your phone’s camera and converts them into data for your contact list. It’s a simple idea that saves hassle and time, turning your collection of cards into easily accessible information.

These are just some of our favourite apps that we want to recommend. If you have any paperless solutions that you enjoy using, share it in the comments!

While they primarily indicate agreement, a secondary purpose has been grafted onto signatures: that they authenticate the identity of the person in some way. After years of seeing store clerks compare signatures for credit card purchases and childhood anxiety around the power of the parental signature on a permission slip or report card, it’s not surprising that we’ve come to think of signatures as a unique personal identifier.

In contracts, the law assumes that people are who they say they are, but it’s worth another trip in the Contractually Time Machine for a look at signatures and identity and how some of the technology in Contractually’s e-signature feature moves the subject forward.

Signatures seemed to come into legal use in medieval times, when most people were illterate and would make a sign of a cross on a document to register agreement. The crosses weren’t considered identifying marks, but they were records of intent.

In the seventeenth century (a wild time of revolution and turmoil in common law countries), fraud became a considerable problem and signatures took on the additional purpose of acting as an identifying mark. That idea didn’t hold up very well, as both the number of contracts and the number of literate people increased, signatures lost their power as reliably identifying marks.

Fast-forward to the present time, and Peter Steiner’s now-famous New Yorker cartoon calls out a key concern about contract-making using the web by observing that

On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. [link]

We don’t expect to make contracts with dogs, but we still want to be reasonably sure that if something goes wrong, we can be reasonably assured that the person who signs a contract online is the person we think we are dealing with.

When someone signs a contract with Contractually’s e-signature feature, we capture information from a number of points to act as identifying marks:

• a person must enter his or her Contractually password at the time of signing
• the IP address of each signatory, along with date and time
• a unique identifier (also called a ‘hash’) created with the exact contents of the document. We call this the document fingerprint
• further hashes of all the information collected around a signature event, called a signature fingerprint

Together these data points can be used to back up the act of an online signature and relating it back to the person you’re dealing with. Our goal with these extra steps is to provide practical assurances without compromising on ease of use and convenience. It’s exciting to think that we’re in a time where, once again, the nature of signatures in the law is changing. Maybe we’ll make it into an entry written in the telepathic blog of some future writer, but we won’t hold our breath.

Introduction: Like the USA, Canada has both federal and provincial acts legislating the acceptability of E-signatures.  Simply stated, the goal of these acts is to say it really is all right to do what is already being done. Two excellent government papers written on this topic in respect to Canada (written by the Federal Government’s Law and Government division) are:

Written in 2008:http://www.parl.gc.ca/Content/LOP/ResearchPublications/prb0012-e.htm#C-Provincial

Written in 2000: http://dsp-psd.pwgsc.gc.ca/Collection-R/LoPBdP/BP/prb0012-e.htm#CANADA(txt)

Federal: At the federal level, the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act is the governing document. A link to a copy of this act is http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/P-8.6/

A clause of note is:

• 2.31:“electronic signature” means a signature that consists of one or more letters, characters, numbers or other symbols in digital form incorporated in, attached to or associated with an electronic document.

Provincial Law: In addition to this federal catch all, provinces have published statutes and bills are that are modeled on the Uniform Electronic Commerce Act. An in depth explanation of these acts is included in the 2008 overview doc. If you want to look at any of the specific act we have compiled a spreadsheet with links to the relevant acts here.

• Listen to the complete interview with Albit Development, LLC about how they are using Contractually

Problem

Albit Development had difficulty developing and negotiating contracts in a timely manner and faced additional challenges in guiding clients to amend or sign agreements. This dysfunction was impacting business processes and profitability.

“It was pretty rough before I started using Contractually,” says Albit Development President Christopher Hobbs. “A lot of my clients are remote and even with the ones in town, it was hard to get a signature on paper… It was just a huge, chaotic paper trail.” The company was manually administering contracts and had no process for version control. Word processing software and freeware such as Google Docs were not meeting their business requirements.

Evaluation of the Solution

While searching for possible solutions to this problem by using online contract templates, Albit Development came across Contractually through social media. “I thought I might as well try it out since I’m looking at solutions and got right into it,” Hobbs says. He commenced testing Contractually for a day by uploading and editing contracts. “I immediately loved it!”

Business Results

Albit Development now uses Contractually with all clients. They now have a working solution for version control, whether negotiating contracts with customers or sub-contractors. “There is no physical paper shuffling back and forth,” Hobbs says. “I can email people links to the contracts or invite them directly on Contractually. It’s been a huge time-saver. Whereas it would sometimes take a week or more to get a contract negotiated and signed, these days with Contractually it takes just a few minutes.”

• Listen to the complete interview with Dojo4 about how they are using Contractually

Problem

Paper-based administration was causing headaches and this inefficiency and was not in keeping with the company’s reputation for being able to move quickly and act flexibly for clients.

“We do most of our accounting in the cloud, our bookkeeping in the cloud and I don’t have a filing cabinet here at Dojo4,” says Corey Kohn, Partner at Dojo4. “We find we’re just more agile having everything in the cloud. There’s just this collection of everything from potential clients who want to have an NDA signed, which can happen up to 10 times a week, to some serious agreements like employment contracts.”

In addition, they had experienced significant challenges with version control. Lack of efficiency in the contract editing and signing process was resulting in serious delays in moving client projects from the negotiation stage into actual development work.

Evaluation of the Solution

Contractually initially met the team at Dojo4 in the summer of 2010 , when Martin Ertl (founder of Contractually) was in Boulder, Colorado for meetings. Contractually provided a personal introduction of the alpha version of software and explained how it could help Dojo4’s business. Initially hesitant due to concerns that clients might not appreciate having signed agreements hosted on the cloud, Dojo4’s management decided to try it out.

“It was an instant success,” Kohn says. “Clients like it as much as we do. I think I was expecting people to feel like they wanted agreements tangibly in my hand, but I got emails from clients saying they really appreciated being able to go through the agreement process so smoothly on Contractually.”

Business Results

Contractually has helped make Dojo4’s business more efficient and its contract administration process more cost-effective. “One of the things that makes our lives easier is that I know where everything is and I’m not trying to scramble through a bunch of weird files trying to find a contract signed by someone a long time ago.” Contractually software is now fully integrated into Dojo4’s standard on-boarding process.

I think the video makes the opposite point. Possibly the only reason we need paper any more is for toilet paper. Almost every other example in the video shows a use of paper that is no longer necessary (I’ll allow that kids drawing is still a great thing). In many cases, using paper is incredibly wasteful and inefficient. (I cringed seeing the printer cranking away.)

Time to go paperless. Paper is dead. Except for toilet paper.

Why are we enabling working with PDF and MS-Word documents, when our vision for Contractually is to make the contracts process paperless? Why support legacy formats like PDF and MS-Word that are designed for printing, that is, built to replicate paper on-screen because the document will be printed?

It’s a bridge between the old world of on-screen paper (PDF and MS-Word) and the new world of paperless contracts:

1. We have customers who love using Contractually for outbound contracts, where they prepare the contract and then share it with other parties. But they haven’t had a simple way to handle inbound contracts in Contractually, where the other party sends a PDF or Word document. Now when they receive an NDA in PDF, it’s easy to upload it to Contractually and still get it signed online.

2. We’ve heard from many first-time users that they came to Contractually because they had a need to sign a contract that’s ready to go. With this new feature, they have a solution to their immediate problem, on the way to going paperless with future contracts. No need to import the document and create a template first.

With this bridge, we can facilitate the shift of contracts and legal documents to web-native documents that are integrated with data flows and people workflows.

You can use the feature by clicking on ‘Start New Contract’, then clicking on ‘Upload’ in the contract selector.

We’re committed to going truly paperless, but we also want to make it easy to get any kind of contract done quickly. Let us know what you think, or if there are other features that you’d like to see us focus on.

SSL Encryption

Contractually uses 256-bit encyption to ensure all data sent between your browser and our service is safe from prying eyes. The lock icon in your address bar ensures you’re talking to Contractually and not a 3rd party service.

Firewalls

Secure Payment Processing

We use a PCI-compliant provider for credit card processing and we do not store any of your credit card info on our own systems.

Encrypted Passwords

Your password is stored in an encrypted file on our servers that we are unable to decrypt. We encrypt passwords using a random salt to defeat commonly used methods to crack your password.

Reliability

Redundant Servers

Trusted Hosting Provider

Constant Backups

Service Level Agreement

We offer a Service Level Agreement for enterprise and law firm customers. Contact us at support@contractual.ly.

Data Ownership, Privacy & Portability

Ownership

You own your data and your contracts. Read our Terms of Service.

Privacy

We ensure the confidentiality and privacy of your data and your contracts. Read our Privacy Policy.

Data Portability

Contractually makes it easy to store all your contracts on your own system if you wish. We automatically email you a PDF of each completed contract and you can download a PDF of your contracts at any time. We can provide you with a copy of all your contracts upon request:  contact us at support@contractual.ly.

You can disable the paper signature option for a contract, from the Parties/Signature tab:

Many customers have been telling us that they want to keep their process of contract preparation and completion entirely paperless. This feature provides another tool to support that.

One nice benefit of these daily summaries is that they’ll reduce the volume of other email notifications. We’ve heard a lot about too many notifications going out, and this a step in the direction of providing more control to our users over what notifications they want to receive when they’re handling contracts.

For now, the daily summary email replaces the instant notifications that users received every time there’s an edit to a contract. You’ll still receive instant notifications when someone accepts your invitation to review or sign a contract and when a contract is completed.

Because the daily summary email reduces the volume of email notifications, we turn it ON by default for you. If you prefer to receive an email notification every time there’s an edit to one of your contracts, you can turn off the daily summary email in your Contractually account, by going to:

Manage Account > User Settings > Emails