DocuSign Audit

Question

I am new with DocuSign, but have a question, in the past I've told people that we should not accept our documents that customers sign using the customer's DS account.  For instance, we mail or email a document for their signature, and they use their DS to electronically sign it.  I have not accepted those because I was afraid that, in the event of a dispute in the future, I might have problems obtaining the audit information from DS since it wasn't my account.   am I right to take that stance?

Derrick.Tran · Accepted Answer

Hello@Todd Ritrievi,Friendly disclosure, I am not a business lawyer and far from it. I hope more folks from the community contribute more to this question from their past experiences. This is a very good question and it doesn’t have a straight forward answer. In my opinion, it will depend on what is being disputed. Terms of a contract, I wouldn’t expect to be an issue because you wouldn’t need a Docusign audit log or history for something like that.You are correct that if the document or agreement was signed from an external Docusign account, it could be more difficult to recover or request the certificate of completion(CoC). Unless you or someone from your business was included within the recipient routing order. If you are a recipient of an envelope, you can download this yourself. Docusign support on most circumstances would not be obligated or authorizedto provide this to you.If there was a dispute on when they signed the document, that would be recorded as a recipient event in the CoC. If you don’t have access to download it as a recipient or sender, then they would have to willingly provide it to you. If not, then you would have to go to court and within the subpoena provide details to bring the CoC.It comes down to how much risk are you willing to take when it’s documents your business authored, but not signed within your Docusign account. You could mitigate some risk, by requiring to be at least carbon copied within the recipient workflow. Then you would have access to download the executed agreement(s) with the CoC.However, this is all moot if you were to have everything sent for signature from your Docusign account.😁

JohnSantos · Answer

@Todd Ritrievi- Welcome to the DocuSign community. If they are using their own DocuSign account, it would be the same if they were signing any other DocuSign account. You need to make sure the validity of the envelope has not been tampered with in the PDF.You might want to contact your legal department or your internal ESignature policies.  Also, since you have DocuSign now, you may no longer mail or email documents.

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