Guides
A signature is a claim. These are the four ways it gets attacked.
Almost nowhere does the law care what your mark looks like. What it cares about is whether you meant to be bound, whether the mark is really yours, whether the document is the one you saw, and whether any of that can still be shown years later. Everything else on this page follows from those four.
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.
The four
Intent, attribution, integrity, evidence
A challenge to a signature is always one of these four, and usually the last one — not that the signature was wrong, but that nobody can now prove it was right.
Intent — did they mean to be bound?
A mark made by accident, under a misunderstanding of what was being signed, or on a document the signer never saw in full, is a mark with a problem. Show the whole document, ask for consent to sign electronically before anything else happens, and record that the consent came first and what version it was given against.
Attribution — was it really them?
A typed name proves very little on its own. Attribution is built from what you can show around the act: the email that was invited and the link only they held, a code to a phone, a signed-in session, an identity document checked, a payment made. Ask for as much as the document is worth — and no more, because every rung is friction.
Integrity — is this the document they signed?
The document must be pinned before it goes out and provably unchanged afterwards. Hashing the original on entry, never modifying the original bytes, and adding marks as an overlay rather than a rewrite is what turns "we did not change it" from an assertion into something a stranger can check.
Evidence — can you still show all this in five years?
This is where most disputes actually turn. A record written at the time, appended to and hash-chained so a later edit is visible, sealed at completion and countersigned by a third party who has no stake in the outcome, is worth far more than a PDF with a signature image on it.
How a mark is made
Drawn, typed, uploaded, or wet ink scanned back in
All four are electronic signatures. Which one you use is a matter of what the room needs, not of legal strength — the strength comes from the four above.
Drawn
A finger or a stylus on the screen. Rutba keeps the resulting image and nothing else — no stroke timing, no pressure, no behavioural biometrics of any kind. A drawn signature is a picture, deliberately.
Typed
The signer types their name and adopts it as their signature. Perfectly valid in the regimes that matter; weakest on attribution, which is why the evidence around it does the work.
Uploaded
An image of a signature the person already has. Convenient, and the same attribution caveat: anyone with the file could have used it, so the surrounding evidence carries the claim.
Wet ink, scanned
Print, sign on paper, scan it back. The path for a document that must be executed physically but whose record you still want kept properly — and for anyone who simply prefers a pen.
Who is signing
Sign in a capacity, and say which
Most signatures on business documents are not personal ones. The capacity is the difference between the company being bound and you being bound, and it belongs on the page rather than in somebody's memory.
The capacities people actually sign in
- Director / officerbinding the company under its constitution
- Authorised signatorybinding it under a delegated authority — know which one
- Attorney-in-factunder a power of attorney; the power is the authority, so keep it with the document
- Partnerbinding the partnership and, depending on the regime, the partners
- Trustee / executoracting for a trust or an estate, not personally
- Witnessattesting that they saw the signature made
- Notary publicattesting in an official capacity, on their own register
Signing for a company
Who may bind a company is a question of that company’s constitution and the law where it is registered, not of the platform. Some regimes accept one authorised signatory; several want two directors, or a director and the company secretary, for a deed. Check before you send, name the signatory in the document rather than only on the pad, and if the authority is delegated, keep the delegation where the document is.
A counterparty is entitled to ask. Being able to answer — here is the person, here is the capacity they signed in, here is the authority — is the difference between a clean file and an argument.
What Rutba does with this Capacity is free text on the party, shown on the execution page, captioned under the signature pad and written into the evidence chain — but deliberately never into the frozen manifest, because it is a claim the signer made rather than a fact the platform verified. The record says who claimed what; it never dresses a claim up as a check.
Witnesses
What a witness actually attests, and what they do not
A witness attests that they saw the signature made. They are not confirming the signer understood the document, agreed with it, or had authority — and they are not a party to it.
Independence is the whole point. A witness with something to gain is a witness whose attestation can be attacked. Not a party, not a beneficiary, and in practice not a spouse or a member of the same household.
Record enough to find them again. Full name, address and occupation is the traditional set, and the reason is practical: a witness may be asked to confirm what they saw years later, and a first name is not enough to locate anybody.
Presence is the open question. Whether a witness may attend by video call rather than standing in the room differs by regime, and for deeds under English law the answer is still no. Rutba invites a witness only once the person they are witnessing has signed, records that sequence, and refuses outright where a regime requires physical presence — rather than recording a remote witness as though the requirement had been met.
Mistakes
Six ways a good document gets undone at the last page
None of these is about the clauses. All of them are about execution, which is the part everyone treats as the formality at the end.
Signing a version that is not the final one
The commonest defect of all. A schedule changes after the signature pages go out, the pages come back, and the executed document is a set of signatures on a document nobody has. Freeze the document first — Rutba pins the bytes by hash on entry, and a revision after sending voids exactly the signatures it invalidates and re-runs those ceremonies.
Initialling some pages and not others
Page initials are a habit, not a legal requirement in most regimes — but a half-initialled document invites the argument that the un-initialled pages were substituted. Either initial every page or none, and rely on integrity you can prove instead.
Signatures with no date, or two different dates
If the agreement runs from execution, the date is the date it starts. Leave it blank and somebody fills it in later; put two in and nobody knows which governs. State the effective date in the document and let the signature dates be what they are.
Signing without stating a capacity
A director who signs their own name with nothing beside it may have signed personally. Say the capacity — director, partner, attorney-in-fact, trustee — and say which company for. Rutba captions every pad with the party's name and designation for exactly this reason.
One person signing for two parties
Common in group companies and almost always a problem: the same human executing for both sides of a contract raises conflict and authority questions, and in some regimes a deed cannot be executed that way at all. Use two people, or a properly granted power of attorney, and record which.
A witness who is not independent
A witness who is a party, a beneficiary, or the spouse of one is the first thing a challenger looks at. In wills it can cost the beneficiary their gift while leaving the will standing. Choose somebody with nothing to gain, and record their full name and address, not just a squiggle.
Questions
Signature questions people actually ask
Is a typed name really a signature?
In the regimes this product is sold into, yes — the UNCITRAL Model Law, ESIGN and UETA, and eIDAS Article 25 all decline to deny legal effect to a signature merely because it is electronic. What varies is how easily it can be attributed to you, which is why the evidence around the act matters more than its shape.
Does a fancier signature carry more weight?
No. An elaborate drawn flourish and a typed name are the same thing in law. What carries weight is the evidence: the invitation only that person held, the code to their phone, the session they were signed into, the consent recorded before the act, and a record nobody can quietly edit afterwards.
What is a qualified electronic signature, and do I need one?
A QES is an EU/UK category backed by a certificate from a qualified trust service provider, and it carries a presumption of validity that an ordinary electronic signature does not. Most commercial documents do not need one. Rutba issues evidence-based signatures today; qualified signatures through a trust service partner are a planned addition, not a current capability.
Can I ask a signer to prove who they are before signing?
Yes, and you choose how far to go: a code to their phone, their signed-in identity, their precise location, a recorded video or audio statement. Every one of them is two-sided — you require it, and the signer agrees to it in the ceremony before it runs, with both facts in the record. Nothing is collected because a sender ticked a box alone.
Do you analyse how someone signs?
No, and this is a deliberate line rather than a gap. No stroke timing, no pressure, no behavioural biometrics. A drawn signature is stored as an image and a recording is a take the person made on purpose. Biometric analysis would put the record into a category of data with far heavier obligations, for evidence value we can get honestly elsewhere.
Is this legal advice?
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.
Build the evidence while the signing happens, not afterwards
Consent before the act, the rungs you asked for and the signer agreed to, the mark, a receipt they keep — and a sealed record anyone can check without an account.