Print, sign, scan, email is still how a lot of contracts get signed. Here is the whole alternative, including what to do with a contract your lawyer wrote in Word.
The print-sign-scan loop is remarkable when you look at it directly. A document that started as a file is converted to paper, marked by hand, photographed by a machine designed for the purpose, converted back to a file, and emailed — arriving as a crooked, ten-megabyte, unsearchable version of what it was to begin with.
It persists because the alternative sounds like it requires a project. It does not.
The most common blocker is the belief that moving to electronic signature means rebuilding your contracts in somebody's template system.
It does not. Any PDF works — one you wrote in Word, one your lawyer drafted, one a client sent you to counter-sign. Upload it, place the fields, send it. The document is unchanged; you are only adding where the signatures go.
This matters most for the contract you are slightly afraid of: the one a solicitor wrote, where every clause was argued over. You do not want to retype that into anything. You want to attach signature boxes to it and leave the words alone.
1. Export to PDF. From Word, Pages or Google Docs, export rather than print. If you are starting from paper, a phone scan is fine — though at that point it is worth asking whether the original file still exists somewhere.
2. Upload it. Drag it in. If the scan came out sideways or the pages are out of order, fix that before sending rather than apologising for it afterwards.
3. Place the fields. Drag signature, initial, date and text fields onto the pages and assign each one to a recipient. This is the only genuinely new skill, and it takes about two minutes the first time.
4. Add the recipients. Name and email for each. Decide whether they sign all at once or one after another — sequential matters when one party must see the other's signature before adding theirs. Anyone who needs a copy but not a signature goes on as a CC.
5. Set an expiry. Optional, and worth doing. A contract with no expiry stays open indefinitely, which quietly corrupts your sense of what is actually live.
6. Send it. Each recipient gets their own private link. They open it in a browser, read it, sign, and are done — no account, no app, no password.
Start to finish, a contract you have already written takes about five minutes.
Worth knowing, because objections usually come from imagining something worse than it is.
They receive an email with a link. They click it. The document opens in their browser — phone, tablet or laptop. They scroll, read, and tap the signature box. They type their name or draw it. They click to finish. Within a minute or two, the completed document lands in their inbox.
No software to install. No account to create. Nothing to print. For most clients this is a noticeably better experience than being asked to find a printer, and a few will say so.
The quiet advantage is not the sending — it is everything after. A sent document tells you when it was opened, chases itself if nobody signs, and expires rather than lingering.
Our chase runs on day three, day four and day seven, and then stops, which we explain in how to chase an unsigned contract without annoying the client. The stopping is as deliberate as the chasing.
When the last signature lands, you get one PDF: the document with each signature stamped in place, followed by a certificate recording who signed, when, and from which IP address, plus a fingerprint of the document as it was sent.
Everyone involved gets the same file. Nothing to merge, rename or reconcile.
That last part is worth dwelling on, because it is the bit the print-sign-scan loop can never produce. A scanned signature has no timestamp you can rely on and no way to show the pages were not swapped. The certificate is the whole reason to bother.
If the reason you are still printing is that you do not have a contract at all, and have been working on emailed agreement, that is the more urgent problem. Four free ones are here to start from:
Download one, fill in the bracketed placeholders, and send it. You can have a signed contract before the end of the afternoon, and you will not have touched a printer.
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