Is it legally permissible to sign employment contracts with electronic signatures without the need for follow-up wet signatures or a hard copy document with an actual pen signature?

Seamus: The short answer to that is that I don't see any difficulties with documents being signed and then scanned in and saved, whether it's your computer system or you have a software or a case management system.

Certainly, within our office, we're doing the whole paper-lite task at the minute, and we're looking into what we need to keep and what we don't need to keep. We've taken the advice from the Law Society here in relation to that as well.

The general gist is you do need to be careful. There are certain legal documents that you will need to keep original and you'll need to keep the wet signature on it, particularly in and around the likes of if you think of wills or people's deeds for properties and things like that. Certainly, the banks require it for registration purposes and things like that.

When it comes to employment contracts, my view on it would be that there's no difficulty in the contract being signed and maybe scanned and sent back in across email as long as it's logged on the system and as long as it's retained on the system for future use. A lot of organisations use a sort of intranet where employees can go into their own personnel file and see those documents and see policies and procedures.

But I don't have any difficulties. I think it's acceptable in terms of an employment contract.

One aspect, I suppose, that I know myself has come up is where you're maybe looking for documents, whenever they're signed by the employee, to be witnessed by another person. Certainly, sometimes there are addendums or there are separate policies and procedures for the likes of restrictive covenants that are being introduced that they are assigned and possibly witnessed as well.

I don't have any difficulty with a witness as long as the witness is present to witness the signature, but you do be a bit sceptical sometimes that the document is signed and then sent to the witness to say they witnessed the signature and then it's sent back to you.

But I think, certainly, the bigger issue now really is that the document comes back and that it's saved onto the system, and then that we deal with all our GDPR precautions there in respect of access to that and retention of the document and looking at those factors as well.

But I think provided that it's saved on the system and that you're able to print it off at any stage or that you're able to look at it at any stage is certainly sufficient.

Rolanda: So is it okay then, just to follow on, to just have a soft copy of the document? You send somebody a contract. They say, "Great. I'm looking forward to starting". They sign it electronically. It comes back. You then store that online or on some sort of database personnel system, and there's no printout at all. Are you saying that's okay then essentially?

Seamus: I think it's fine. It's a duplicate of it on the system. I know that the aspect now is that people are looking to . . . it's the safer way, almost, to store the documents safely password-protected on your computer system than it is for them to be in a filing cabinet.

A lot of people, and I include myself in this, find it strange not working with paper and reading off the screen and things like that. It takes a bit of time to get used to it, but there's certainly no legal impediment for it to happen that way.

Just a couple of practical considerations. If you're going to save it on the system, make sure that it's backed up multiple times, and that if you lose one system, you're able to get it somewhere else, and that the backups are in different locations, and that there are safeguards for your privacy, and that your process is in place for destruction of the document once you're out of your safe period of relevancy.

I think this is certainly the way that things are going to move forward in the future. Hopefully, it will give us a lot more space in our offices.