The City of Vancouver’s journey towards adopting the use of electronic signatures began in August 2014 with a handful of DocuSign licenses and a vision to transform the approval and workflow processes associated with the legal signing of documents. An important consideration that took some time was providing the legal authority under city ordinance to give elected officials, administration, and staff the authority to use electronic signatures to conduct city business.

Ordinances and Resolutions were selected as the first document types to move from pen and paper to electronic signature. The process needed to be easy and efficient. In order to accomplish this, we worked with the city clerk’s office, the city attorney, and their IT staff to identify all the steps involved, from preparing documents to collecting signatures and filing records. Our goal was to streamline the user experience to ensure the fewest number of clicks and keystrokes needed to initiate and complete a transaction.

We accomplished this by creating a simple web form that includes additional metadata for record filing and fields to identify the required signers. After a document has been prepared for electronic signature, it is uploaded and sent to each recipient with a single click. Then, after a document has been signed electronically by all recipients, it is automatically pushed to a secure network location for storage in the city’s document imaging and records management system.