@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.

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 authorized to 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. 

Hi @Todd Ritrievi,

I hope you are doing well.

I would like to confirm if you were able to solve your issue by utilizing the solution that was suggested or if the information that was provided was useful.

If so, please mark it as the best answer by clicking “Select as Best” to make it easier for other users to find.

Otherwise, feel free to let me know and I will gladly help you address the situation as soon as possible.

Best regards,

Christopher | Docusign Community Moderator

"Select as Best" below if you find the answer a valid solution to your issue.