What is a wet signature?

Where the term came from

Nobody said wet signature until there was a dry alternative. The phrase spread through law firms in the 1990s as fax and then email arrived, and it survives because it is useful shorthand in an instruction: post the wet signed original, not a copy. Ink on paper had no name of its own before, in the way that nobody said acoustic guitar until electric ones existed. The word wet is literal. It refers to ink that was wet when the pen moved, which is why a photocopy of a signed page is not a wet signature at all, even though the mark on it was made by hand.

What ink actually proves

Less than most people assume. A handwritten mark can be compared against known samples by an examiner, and the paper itself can be tested for order of strokes or later alteration, but both are slow and contested. What a paper original really gives you is a single artefact that cannot be duplicated without trace, held by one party at a time. Against that, it records nothing about the moment of signing. Who watched, what the signer had read, whether the pages in the file today are the pages signed that day: none of that comes from the ink. Those questions are answered by whatever process surrounded the signing, not by the signature itself.

The Australian documents that still expect paper

The Electronic Transactions Act 1999 lets regulations exclude classes of document, and the states keep their own lists, which is why the answer is never a single rule. In practice the recurring exclusions are wills and codicils, statutory declarations and affidavits, and certain land dealings, along with some court documents. Powers of attorney and deeds vary by state and by year, because several temporary pandemic measures were later made permanent in some jurisdictions and lapsed in others. Treat any document that needs a witness, a justice of the peace or registration with a land titles office as one to check before sending, rather than after.

Print, sign and scan is a third thing

A scanned page sits between the two and inherits the weaknesses of both. It is not a paper original, because the original is in somebody's recycling, and it is not a recorded electronic signing either, because the PDF carries no identity check, no timestamp beyond file metadata and nothing that would show a later edit. Two scans of the same page can differ and neither is authoritative. If a dispute reaches the point of asking which version was signed, a scan gives a court an image and an argument. That is the practical case for choosing one path or the other rather than the hybrid most offices default to.

What replaces it when a PDF is sent for signature

The signer draws or types their mark in the browser and it is stored as a PNG, with the method recorded in the signed event. Around that mark sits the material a paper original never had: an audit trail of eighteen event types chained with sha256, the address and timestamp of each action, and a certificate of completion with ENVELOPE, SIGNERS and EVENT LOG sections. The finished PDF is certified with PAdES at DocMDP P=1, so any later edit shows up in a reader. That is a different kind of proof from handwriting, and for ordinary commercial documents it is a good deal easier to produce.

Keeping the original, and finding it later

A paper original is only useful if somebody can produce it. That means a register of what was signed, when, and where the pages live, because a filing cabinet with no index is functionally the same as a lost document. Chain of custody matters too: an original that has been posted between three offices has been out of anyone's control for weeks. Where the original genuinely matters, the usual arrangement is one holder, a scanned working copy for everyday use, and a note in the register saying who holds the paper. If the original is lost, a court will generally accept secondary evidence of the contents, but the party relying on it has to explain the loss, which is a conversation nobody wants to have. Electronic records invert the problem: retrieval is trivial and the effort moves to proving the file has not changed.

Questions people ask