UETA

A year before the federal ESIGN Act, the Uniform Law Commission published UETA as a template states could adopt to recognize electronic signatures. It worked: 49 states, DC, and the US territories have adopted it. New York is the holdout, but only technically, since its own ESRA statute does the same job.

The core rule

UETA's section 7 carries the whole statute: a record or signature can't be denied legal effect solely because it's electronic, and a contract can't be denied enforceability solely because an electronic record was used in its formation. The condition that matters is agreement, since UETA applies only between parties who each agreed to conduct the transaction electronically. Filling in and signing an online form is itself conduct showing that agreement.

UETA vs ESIGN

They overlap on purpose. ESIGN is federal and uniform; UETA is state law and slightly more detailed on things like attribution and the effect of security procedures. Where a state adopted UETA without nonstandard amendments, ESIGN defers to it. In practice you don't pick one: a compliant e-signature process satisfies both at once.

What it means for your forms

Sign Sail's signing flow is built around UETA's attribution logic: the signature is linked to the act of the person signing through their IP, timestamp, user-agent, and an explicit consent step, and the record is kept tamper-evident with a SHA-256 hash. If a signer later disputes the signature, you have the security-procedure evidence UETA section 9 says courts may consider.