Paper documents will probably be around for a long time to come, but certainly our computer age has introduced other ways to memorialize legal transactions. Some transactions such as insurance agreements, or real estate financing are completed entirely on the computer with signatures of the interested parties applied to a digital pad.
Once embedded in the digital version of the document, the “signature” that is printed as part of the document is often illegible or may look like a collection of random pixels. All is not lost, however. The signature is still there in digital form. Once the signature file is parsed from the encrypted data file, it can be deciphered and analyzed just like a traditional handwritten signature.