Delay signature after document is received

Report · Sep 03, 2018

My company uses Adobe Sign for collecting signatures. It has a use case where it implements the following workflow to comply with local law for particular contracts that requires them to be held for a period before signing:

Send documents to a client
Client returns a receipt saying they've received the documents
The client can read but can't sign the documents until a fixed number of days have passed after the date of the receipt, a "holding period", which might be 7 days or longer
Once the period has elapsed, the documents can be signed
If the documents aren't signed before a later date, say 7 days after the holding period, they can't be signed
The documents are then counter signed by the company to complete the signing workflow
An administration process then commences

We have to be able to prove that the client had the documents for the required holding period and did not sign until it had expired. The idea is that they must have an opportunity seek advice (legal, financial, whatever) before signing.

Is it possible to implement this as an automated workflow in Adobe Sign and only send one set of documents?

At present, a read–only version of the documents is sent first and the recipient must acknowledge receipt by email. Then a signable version is sent at the end of the holding period. There are issues with this process, e.g. the client can't be certain that the documents are identical without going over them again (and we don't expect them to be sophisticated enough to do MD5 hashes or whatever to check they're the same), and there is a lot of manual oversight and actions that must occur promptly.

We're currently looking at improving the workflow and I'd like to determine if we can fix this part.

Report · Oct 03, 2018

2 options come to mind.

One you split it in 2 agreements.

1st agreement is send to the recipient and you set the recipient as a 'Certified recipient role'. This means you still use the Adobe Sign audit trail for tracking.

After they complete (by simply receiving) you'd get a webhook update and then count to 7 days before sending a new agreement, this time using the Signer role for the sender. You would include an expiry date set a 7 days to ensure the second agreement is signed within that time frame.

You can use the completed document from the first agreement as the source for the second agreement. Though technically there's still the issue of having 2 documents.

option 2 would be to contain it within one agreement. You'd create an agreement with 2 recipients

recipient 1 same as before, the intended client with a certified recipient role, second recipient a delegator role, or a placeholder email.

Once recipient 1 confirms receipt, again wait 7 days, then use the api to replace recipient 2 with the intended signer. You can also use the api to set a new expiration date.

3rd option comes to mind is where you ask Support to turn off emails created by Sign. In this case create an agreement again with two recipients. In this case it can be the same email address, but again recipient 1 is the Certified recipient and recipient 2 the signer.

The first recipient can receive the Sign email as per usual, but any following recipients would not get any Sign generated emails.

Again once receipt is confirmed, you wait 7 days and now retrieve the signing url and distribute this url in some way to the intended signer,

but there's no easy delay parameter as such.