Are electronic signatures legally binding? Yes — here are the articles

Regulation (EU) No 910/2014 provides in article 25(1) that an electronic signature shall not be denied legal effect and admissibility as evidence in legal proceedings solely on the grounds that it is in electronic form or that it does not meet the requirements for qualified electronic signatures. Note what that second clause does: even a signature nowhere near the qualified tier cannot be dismissed merely for being electronic.

Beyond the floor, article 25(2) gives qualified electronic signatures — advanced signatures on qualified certificates from qualified providers (article 3(12)) — the equivalent legal effect of a handwritten signature. The tiers affect the strength of the presumption you can assert, not whether the signature is lawful.

Federal: the ESIGN Act, 15 U.S.C. §7001(a), provides that a signature or record relating to interstate or foreign commerce may not be denied legal effect, validity or enforceability solely because it is electronic. For consumer transactions, §7001(c) attaches a procedure: a clear and conspicuous disclosure of the right to paper, and the consumer's affirmative consent to electronic form, before an electronic record can carry the effect.

State: UETA — the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act — bars denying legal effect solely for being electronic (§7) and is enacted in 49 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. New York is the exception with its own Electronic Signatures and Records Act, New York State Technology Law §§ 301–309, which reaches the same floor. State UETA versions also carve out particular instruments — wills and certain family-law records — which stay outside electronic form.

What actually gets contested in practice is not 'is an e-signature lawful' but 'was it this person, did they agree, and is this the document they signed'. Those are questions of evidence, and they are answered by the record: identity checks, the ceremony log, the document digest, the trusted timestamp.

That is the design centre of a compliant signing product: the signature act is legally sufficient with little ceremony, so the product's job is to build the evidence that survives a contest — which is why identity methods, audit trails and PAdES profiles matter more than which tier a marketing page implies.

Some instruments stay outside electronic form by law — wills, certain family-law records under state UETA carve-outs — and some member-state regimes require the qualified tier for particular acts. The right question before a signing project is what the counterparty's regime requires here, not whether e-signatures 'work'.