Compliance

Nothing on this page is legal advice, and it isn't a substitute for asking your own lawyer whether a specific document, in a specific jurisdiction, for a specific purpose, is a good candidate for an electronic signature. Most commercial contracts are. Some things — wills, certain court filings, some real estate transfers — aren't, regardless of which tool signs them.

What follows describes the record e-Tanzz actually keeps, so you and your lawyer can judge for yourselves whether it’s enough for what you’re signing.

In the United States, the federal ESIGN Act (2000) and the state-level Uniform Electronic Transactions Act give an electronic signature the same legal weight as a handwritten one, provided a few conditions are met: the signer intended to sign, they consented to do business electronically, and there’s a record capable of being reproduced and attributed to them.

e-Tanzz is built around that last requirement specifically — the signing flow exists to produce exactly that kind of record, not just to collect a drawn mark.

Every signature on a document produces, and permanently retains:

• An explicit statement of intent. The signer ticks a box that says they mean to sign — never pre-checked, never implied by clicking “submit”. No signature is recorded without it.
• A typed legal name (and title, where relevant) — the part that actually carries legal weight, alongside the drawn or typed mark next to it.
• A unique link per signer. Each recipient gets their own token; nobody can sign as somebody else by sharing a URL, and the record can say exactly who followed which link.
• Timestamps for every step — sent, opened, signed (or declined) — recorded in UTC on our server, not supplied by the signer’s own clock.
• The connection it came from — an IP address and user agent string, captured at the moment of signing.
• A tamper-evident file. The signature is burned directly into the PDF; the original, unsigned file is retained separately so the two can be compared.

Once every recipient has signed, e-Tanzz generates a certificate summarizing the whole record — who signed, when, from where, and what they explicitly agreed to for every field on the document. It travels with the signed PDF, so the evidence isn’t a separate thing you have to remember to keep.

For documents that require signers in a specific sequence, e-Tanzz enforces that order server-side — a later signer’s link simply doesn’t let them sign until everyone ahead of them has. The record shows the order was followed, not just claimed.

Signed documents, their certificates, and the underlying audit trail are retained for as long as your account exists, and are yours to export at any time — see Settings → Download everything. Deleting your account deletes them; there is no separate archive holding a copy after that, which is a privacy commitment as much as anything else — see Security.

The evidence described above — intent, identity, an unbroken timestamped record — is the same substance most electronic-signature frameworks look for, including the EU’s eIDAS regulation for a “simple” or “advanced” electronic signature. e-Tanzz does not currently offer qualified electronic signatures (eIDAS “QES”) backed by a certified trust service provider — if your specific transaction requires that tier, e-Tanzz isn’t the right tool for it yet.