The COVID-19 pandemic has unsurprisingly resulted in many people in the business community, including lawyers, transacting business remotely. With that uptick comes more contracts utilizing electronic signatures and remote depositions and notarizations. Not only is the use of an e-signature generally more convenient for the parties involved in a transaction, but an e-sig provides many more layers of security and protection from claims of forgery than a wet-signature because the process requires the user to confirm her identity to bind her signature to that identity through a digital certificate.
So what happens when there’s a contractual dispute, and one of the parties is seeking to enforce a contract while the counterparty is claiming that its electronic signature has been forged? On October 26, 2023, Justice Daniel J. Doyle of the Monroe County Commercial Division dealt with just that in AJ Equity Group LLC v Office Connection, Inc., in which he held that the defendant’s mere denial that she e-signed an agreement was not sufficient to dismiss a breach of contract claim, but also that the plaintiff was not entitled to summary judgment on its breach claim for failure to explain the relevance and significance of the signature certificate showing that the electronic signature was valid.Continue Reading The Evidence Behind E-SIGS
A recent decision from the First Department reminds us that New York courts are not sympathetic to duress claims when the alleged acts or threatened acts fall within the ambit of the defendant’s rights under a valid agreement.
A reminder to practitioners: when a contract is unambiguous, the submission of a hurricane of extrinsic evidence to “interpret” it on a pre-answer motion to dismiss won’t fly.