Guides

Know what you are signing before you sign it.

A signing product that only collects marks is a product that will happily help you execute the wrong document the wrong way. These guides cover what each kind of paper is, what your signature commits you to, and what a document needs beyond signatures to actually work where it is used — and the first of them drafts one for you, for the jurisdiction it is for.

Draft a document Start with the document types

This is general information to help you prepare, not legal advice. Requirements differ by jurisdiction and change; where a document matters, take advice where it will be used.

Five guides

Written for the person holding the paper

No forms to fill in, no account, nothing gated. If you never buy anything from us these pages are still the ones we would want you to have read before you signed.

Draft a document, here, now

The wizard

The practical half of these guides. Choose where the document is for and which document it is, answer the questions, and it is composed for that jurisdiction — the governing-law wording, the execution block, and whether the paper owes stamp duty where you are. Print it, or take it into an account with the parties and signature blocks already in place.

Runs the signing engine’s own library
Nothing leaves your browser

The kinds of paper, and what signing them means

Document types

12 categories, from a supply agreement to a marriage instrument. What each one is, what your signature commits you to, what it may need beyond signatures — and which of them can never be executed electronically, with the law that says so.

5 kinds you can send from here
7 the engine refuses, with citations

What makes a signature stand up

Signature guidelines

Intent, attribution, integrity, evidence — the four things anyone challenging a signature will attack. How to sign in a capacity, who may sign for a company, what a witness actually attests, and the mistakes that undo an otherwise good document.

Signing in a capacity
Witnesses and independence

Preparing a document that does its job

Preparation

The anatomy of an agreement, the execution block done properly, page and schedule integrity, and a pre-send checklist. Most documents that fail do not fail on their clauses; they fail on the last page.

The execution block
A pre-send checklist

Why to have a will — and why you cannot sign one here

Wills and estates

What happens when there is no will, what a valid one needs, and the things people leave out. You can draft one in the shared word processor and print it — the drafting wizard deliberately does not offer wills yet — and it can never be executed electronically here, because almost every jurisdiction on earth requires wet ink and witnesses in the room.

Intestacy, plainly
Draft and print, sign on paper

At a glance

Can this be signed electronically?

The 12 categories the engine knows, and its answer for each. These are not our editorial opinion: they restate the registry the engine consults on every send, so what you read here is what you will meet when you try it.

Document	Here?	The short reason
General commercial or civil agreement	Yes	UNCITRAL Model Law on Electronic Commerce Arts 5–7; US ESIGN 15 USC §7001 / UETA; UK Law Commission (2019); eIDAS Art 25(1).
Non-disclosure agreement	Yes	As general commercial — no reviewed regime treats an NDA specially.
Employment contract or offer	Yes	Generally as general commercial; DE BGB §623 (termination) and TzBfG §14(4) (fixed-term) are the known wet-ink islands.
Lease or rental agreement	Yes	Short residential and commercial leases are generally e-signable; registrable interests follow real property transfer.
Deed	Yes	Witnessing requirements vary; the witness party type records observation, not physical presence.
Will or testamentary instrument	No — on paper	Excluded from US ESIGN (15 USC §7003(a)(1)), from UETA, and from the e-signable set in every regime reviewed here.
Marriage or civil partnership instrument	No — on paper	Excluded from US ESIGN (15 USC §7003(a)(2), matters of family law); and in every reviewed regime marriage is a statutory act solemnised before an authorised person with witnesses and registered, rather than a private instrument.
Prenuptial, postnuptial or matrimonial property agreement	No — on paper	Within the family-law carve-out from ESIGN (15 USC §7003(a)(2)) and its UETA equivalents; a matrimonial property regime requires a notarial deed in the reviewed civil-law regimes (DE BGB §1410, FR Code civil art. 1394, ES, IT); in England & Wales such an agreement is not binding and is given weight only where the Radmacher v Granatino [2010] UKSC 42 safeguards are met.
Family-law instrument	No — on paper	Excluded from US ESIGN (15 USC §7003(a)(2)); formal requirements in most regimes.
Court process or filing	No — on paper	Court documents follow the court’s own rules, not this service — excluded from ESIGN (15 USC §7003(b)).
Notarial act	No — on paper	Notarisation is an officiated act this service does not perform.
Real property transfer	No — on paper	Land-registry form requirements in most regimes; treated as excluded until a specific registry’s own process is implemented.

A “yes” is a baseline, not a promise: a reviewed regime can be stricter, and the engine applies the stricter reading. A deed under English law is the clearest case — allowed worldwide, refused there, because the witness must be physically present and we will not record a remote one as though they were.

Where these answers come from Every verdict and citation on these pages restates the jurisdiction gateway the engine uses to judge a send — one set of rules, versioned as data, consulted by the product and quoted by the site. That is deliberate: a marketing page that says one thing while the software does another is worse than no page. This is general information to help you prepare, not legal advice. Requirements differ by jurisdiction and change; where a document matters, take advice where it will be used.

Prepared the document? Send it and keep the evidence.

Pay as you go per envelope, or one flat subscription for the organization. Nobody you send to is ever charged, and verification is free forever.

Create your account See how an agreement lives

Before you rely on any of this

These guides are written to help you prepare and to help you know what to ask. They are not a substitute for advice on your own situation, and the difference matters most precisely where the document does.

This is information, not advice: Nothing on these pages is legal advice, and reading them creates no lawyer–client relationship. They describe what documents generally are and what regimes generally require, so that you can ask better questions of somebody qualified to answer them for your situation.
Rutba is not a law firm: We are a software company. Nobody here reviews your documents, chooses your terms, or advises on your circumstances, and no member of our staff is acting as your lawyer. Where a document matters, instruct someone who is.
The law differs by place, and changes: These pages are written around the patterns common to the regimes the product has reviewed, and they name the exceptions we know of. They cannot cover every jurisdiction, and a rule correct on the date below may not be correct when you read it. What governs is the law where the document is used, not the law of the place you happen to be sitting.
The citations are pointers, not summaries: Where a page names a statute or a case, it does so to tell you and your adviser where to look. A named source is not a substitute for reading it, and a short citation cannot carry the qualifications the source itself contains.
The software may refuse; that is not a judgment on your document: When the product declines to execute a category electronically, it is applying the rules recorded in its jurisdiction gateway — not assessing your particular document, your circumstances, or whether what you are doing is a good idea. Equally, that it will send something is not an opinion that the document is valid, complete or wise.

Last reviewed 5 September 2026. If something here is wrong, out of date, or misleading where you are, tell us at hello@rutba.io and we will correct it. A guide nobody can correct is a guide that quietly rots.