It's great to see fresh efforts being made in this space. I categorically refuse to use DocuSign, due to objectionable clauses in their Terms and Conditions (
https://www.docusign.com/legal/terms-and-conditions or https://archive.ph/y27U4). Some examples are below. As far as I'm concerned nobody should agree to use their service.
Unfortunately DocuSign has monopolized electronic signatures in some contexts (examples from my own local experience: healthcare, real estate), to the extent that it's become exceedingly difficult to request a simple PDF to print, hand-sign, scan and return. Such friction is common at companies who outsource their paperwork to third party workflow providers. I'm fortunate that folks I do business with tend to want my signature badly enough to escalate to someone with authority who can make a procedural exception, but I doubt everyone is so lucky and suspect many users are effectively "bullied" into accepting the Terms regardless of their wishes.
Clauses I find objectionable include:
- various consents to analytics, including use of my data to feed their machine learning (might have been more palatable if they provided some insight and stronger confidentiality assurances)
- 2.1.1 waiver of jury trials and class actions
- 8 indemnification (a and e are a little broad, I'm not going to pay for your lawyers in circumstances that don't warrant it)
- 9.2 is unfair; any damages caps should be reciprocal
- confusing and possibly overly-broad intellectual property rights clause 1.1 (they should explicitely restrict their protections to only DocuSign's IP, not "all IP").
- They expressly disclaim any warranties regarding accuracy, quality, fitness for purpose or that information they provide will be error-free. That feels dangerous in the context of forming contracts. A fundamental value proposition of their business is accuracy ("Oops we made a mistake and actually your counterpart did not really sign the document..."). Liability here falls back to the parties, and as a consumer I refuse to be liable for their mistakes.
- Nor am I a fan of increasingly common clauses along the lines of "we can modify our terms at any time and you'll be deemed to accept the revisions" or "you further agree to any other notices we might choose to inject elsewhere onto our site" or vague expectations I consent to additional third party licenses not disclosed at this time (and ironically some of their preamble along these lines seems to be in conflict with 10.8). If you and I agree to something, then later you want to change your mind, you'd better come back and seek fresh consent. If you're making changes so often as to make that annoying and inconvenient, then it's a sign you have too many salaried lawyers on staff and need to replace them with a team empowered to stop wasting my time and yours and get this right the first time. Customer attention is a precious resource, and companies sending out legal updates on a frequent basis can't possibly in good faith expect consumers to keep up with reading them.
- I take offense to their Terms page making connections to Twitter, Facebook, Salesforce, Google analytics, etc. and subjecting me to cookies prompts. All this is not required to simply provide me with your terms of use, and somewhat inappropriate seeing as I haven't yet consented to anything.
These are off their current website, but I recall similarly problematic terms the last time I started (and subsequently abandoned) a signature attempt some years back.
And don't even get me started on their Privacy policy. (Among the various problems... nobody should have to "opt out" of their personal data being sold to other parties).
Unfortunately DocuSign has monopolized electronic signatures in some contexts (examples from my own local experience: healthcare, real estate), to the extent that it's become exceedingly difficult to request a simple PDF to print, hand-sign, scan and return. Such friction is common at companies who outsource their paperwork to third party workflow providers. I'm fortunate that folks I do business with tend to want my signature badly enough to escalate to someone with authority who can make a procedural exception, but I doubt everyone is so lucky and suspect many users are effectively "bullied" into accepting the Terms regardless of their wishes.
Clauses I find objectionable include:
- various consents to analytics, including use of my data to feed their machine learning (might have been more palatable if they provided some insight and stronger confidentiality assurances)
- 2.1.1 waiver of jury trials and class actions
- 8 indemnification (a and e are a little broad, I'm not going to pay for your lawyers in circumstances that don't warrant it)
- 9.2 is unfair; any damages caps should be reciprocal
- confusing and possibly overly-broad intellectual property rights clause 1.1 (they should explicitely restrict their protections to only DocuSign's IP, not "all IP").
- They expressly disclaim any warranties regarding accuracy, quality, fitness for purpose or that information they provide will be error-free. That feels dangerous in the context of forming contracts. A fundamental value proposition of their business is accuracy ("Oops we made a mistake and actually your counterpart did not really sign the document..."). Liability here falls back to the parties, and as a consumer I refuse to be liable for their mistakes.
- Nor am I a fan of increasingly common clauses along the lines of "we can modify our terms at any time and you'll be deemed to accept the revisions" or "you further agree to any other notices we might choose to inject elsewhere onto our site" or vague expectations I consent to additional third party licenses not disclosed at this time (and ironically some of their preamble along these lines seems to be in conflict with 10.8). If you and I agree to something, then later you want to change your mind, you'd better come back and seek fresh consent. If you're making changes so often as to make that annoying and inconvenient, then it's a sign you have too many salaried lawyers on staff and need to replace them with a team empowered to stop wasting my time and yours and get this right the first time. Customer attention is a precious resource, and companies sending out legal updates on a frequent basis can't possibly in good faith expect consumers to keep up with reading them.
- I take offense to their Terms page making connections to Twitter, Facebook, Salesforce, Google analytics, etc. and subjecting me to cookies prompts. All this is not required to simply provide me with your terms of use, and somewhat inappropriate seeing as I haven't yet consented to anything.
These are off their current website, but I recall similarly problematic terms the last time I started (and subsequently abandoned) a signature attempt some years back.
And don't even get me started on their Privacy policy. (Among the various problems... nobody should have to "opt out" of their personal data being sold to other parties).