Introduction to Online Forms & Online Document Signing

Hold on to your seats, because I’m about to share some details about online forms and e-signatures. When you are experiencing an issue with a company or service, you use a form to contact their support staff. When you sign up for an online subscription or company newsletter, you fill out a form. When you make a purchase online, you guessed it, you use a form. Forms are everywhere around us if you’re looking for them, and JotForm can help you create them to meet your needs.

E-signatures are also everywhere, as they are fast becoming the modern way of obtaining agreement to legal documents. You may be contracting with a client overseas, or need to get a document quickly signed off while the other party is on holiday. E-signatures can help you do that, and the Adobe Document Cloud with eSign services is a secure and easy-to-use e-signature program that has partnered with JotForm.

The World of Online Forms

Schools and universities use forms to improve their education programs. School administrators collecting data from course evaluations and make adjustments accordingly, all while cutting back on time, energy, and resources that was once spent on manually giving out and analyzing physical paper forms. Non-profits and charitable organizations use forms to collect donations, carry out surveys, and email their audience. Hospitals use forms to get a patient’s history and use the information to make decisions on their health care.

JotForm and Legal Protection

JotForm is the destination for online forms. As the easiest online form builder, JotForm makes it simple for you to create forms, keep track of your submission data, and analyze your results with Form Analytics. JotForm offers hundreds of integrations that allow you to take your forms to the next level, including PayPal, Adobe, SalesForce, DropBox, MailChimp, Google Docs, & many more.

When collecting information from users, it’s always important to make sure that they have agreed to your Privacy Policy. Most websites use what is called a browsewrap method to have users agree to their terms. Browsewrap is where the user has to browse the website to find the terms. Including a checkbox at the end of your JotForm form provides much stronger legal protection, and is called a clickwrap method. Your user has actually clicked “I Agree”, which gives you more legal certainty that they have agreed to your terms.

JotForm not only allows you to easily make your forms, but it also has the capability to insert a checkbox at the end, so that you can ask your users to agree to your Privacy Policy or Terms of Use. There are a number of ways that you can do this.

First, you can manually insert a checkbox at the end of your form. The steps to do this are:

1. Create a checkbox;

2. Name the checkbox “I agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy”; and

3. Name the checkbox response as “I agree”.

The second method is to use a small piece of HTML to do the above steps for you, by inserting

HTML in the Options field, like this:

This is what the HTML will look like:

JotForm provides full instructions here.

Finally, the third method that you can use is JotForm’s Terms & Conditions widget, which will do everything automatically for you.

E-Signatures and Legally Binding Agreements

JotForm’s latest legal widget is the Adobe Document Cloud with eSign services (formally known as EchoSign), which allows you to collect e-signatures you trust from Adobe. With a click, your form visitors can sign legally binding documents, making it quick and simple to conduct business.

For some agreements, having a legally binding signature is important, as there may be some terms that you want to have clearly agreed between the parties. For example, at the end of your Club Membership Registration Form you may want to include a signature field so that your members can agree to rules that they will follow at your club.

Or, if you are using a Photography Session Contract it will be important to make sure your clients agree not to claim copyright in the photos that you take of them. The Adobe Document Cloud eSign widget can help you make these web forms into legally binding agreements. Your client or other party will be able to write their signature on screen using their mouse, type their name into the document, or sign with their email address. Here’s what it looks like when a party’s name is typed in:

Here’s an example of what the Adobe eSign widget signature block looks like signing with an email address:

After the person has signed the agreement, it will send a signed copy to both parties.

Endorsed and promoted by Adobe, JotForm gives its users access to the market leader in PDF document signing services. They can use it to sign employment contracts, business agreements, or any other type of document you need two parties to agree to in writing. If you have any questions about JotForm, online forms, the e-Sign widget or just want to say hi, please feel free to contact JotForm’s 24/7 global support team.