Use of e-contracts and e-signatures in Business Contracts

Technology today has become a vital component of the society; all societal interactions are embracing technology very rapidly. In the field of business, technology is revolutionizing how people interact and conduct business. At the moment, the internet is making it possible for people to transact over the internet media, enabling them improve business efficiency and effectiveness greatly. While such trends emerge laws and legal regulations relating to conducting business over through the cyber space are also evolving, just as rapidly. Arguing on the parallel, legal trends and issues pertaining to the use of e-contracts and e-signatures in carrying out business today will be the focus.

Traditionally, contracting was limited to the physical presence of the contracting parties. Such contracts involved many formalities such as written evidence and in some cases a witness into the transaction. With the emergence of the internet, transactions take place electronically, which has given birth to e-commerce. The rapid expansion and development of e-commerce have led to the emergence of a new legal trend, e-contracting. E contracting is an emergent legal issue in e-commerce, which aims at making electronic contracts legally binding. E-contracts anchor upon the principles of contract law, such that agreements arising from such contracts are legally binding (Ottaviani, 2010). In electronic contracts, many activities involved such offer and acceptance and consideration occur virtually with parties having not to meet physically.

Electronic contracts exist in various ways. For example, agreements can take the form of “click-wraps”, ”browse wraps” or “shrink wraps”. Click-wrap and shrink-wrap agreements enable parties to enter into a binding ...

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...ted to such transactions. Evidently, however, business people are presented with a greater challenge of keeping the up-to date with the trends in legal issues pertaining cyber law to avoid hurting their businesses.

Works Cited

Blythe, S. (2005). Digital signature law of the United Nations, European Union, United Kingdom and United aStates: Promotion of growth in e-commerce with enhanced security. Richmond Journal of Law & technology, 11(2), 1-20.

Ishak, I. (2007, October 8). Going the dot com way. The edge.

Marjanovic, O., & Milosevic, Z. (2001). Towards formal modeling of e-Contracts. In Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference, pp. 59-68.

Ottaviani, J. (2010, July 28). E-SIGN Prevents Enforcement of Emailed Contract Terms–Buckles v. Investordigs. Retrieved March 12, 2014, from http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2010/07/colorado_court.htm