Legal signatures ramifications

[Janet Kaul]

I'd adore it if anyone could give me insight on the following dilemma.

Our Legal department wants to put all of their contracts online for easier 
searching and so they don't have to fax them to our salespeople. They are 
scanning in signed contracts, as the salespeople need the signatures to show 
customers.

However, they don't want anyone to be able to alter these contracts. Apparently, 
by federal law, any facsimile of a contract with signatures is still a legal 
contract, and we could be held liable for someone who has a copy and somehow 
changes it.

We are scanning the contracts into Acrobat, putting them into a document 
management system, and preventing anyone from saving a copy and changing it on 
their desktop without a password (they have to be able to print to take a copy 
to customers).

Of course, there is still always the opportunity to do a screen shot when 
viewing, or print a copy out, scan it in, and edit it on the desktop somehow. 
These possibilities are frightening our legal department into abandoning putting 
contracts on line. They realize they face the same possibilities when faxing 
contracts to the sales people, but it's on a much smaller scale since not all 
the contracts are easily obtainable that way.

Has anyone else faced such a situation? How did you resolve it? Does anyone have 
contracts on line in their systems? Does anyone know of any changes to the law 
that might protect a company in these situations?

Any help is appreciated.

Janet Kaul, Corporate Knowledge Librarian, jmk at synopsys.com