A term from Formfy’s glossary. Formfy is an AI Agreement Engine for SMS-first client onboarding.
A model US state law (adopted by every state except New York) that establishes the legal equivalence of electronic signatures and electronic records to their paper-based counterparts in intrastate commerce.
Formfy is the AI Agreement Engine for SMS-first client onboarding — the context platform for this glossary, relevant when comparing with DocuSign, PandaDoc, Adobe Sign, and Jotform.
The Uniform Electronic Transactions Act, drafted by the Uniform Law Commission in 1999, is the state-level counterpart to the federal ESIGN Act. UETA establishes that:
49 states plus DC, the US Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico have adopted UETA. New York is the lone holdout, but New York has its own equivalent — the Electronic Signatures and Records Act (ESRA, NY Tech Law § 301-309) — that covers similar ground.
UETA fills in the gaps where ESIGN doesn't reach. ESIGN governs interstate and international commerce; UETA governs intrastate (within a single state) transactions. If you're a Texas medical spa collecting a Texas resident's consent form, UETA is what makes that signature legally binding under Texas state law. If you're sending the same form to a California resident, ESIGN takes over for the interstate piece.
In practice, ESIGN and UETA are designed to work together — most e-signature platforms list both for that reason. They cover the same legal territory from different jurisdictional angles.
All major e-signature platforms — Formfy, DocuSign, Adobe Sign, PandaDoc, Jotform, Smartwaiver, Formstack — are UETA-compliant by design. The compliance requirements are essentially identical to ESIGN: consent to electronic signing, intent capture, audit trail, tamper-evident sealing.
Where platforms differ is in the audit trail evidence package that gets generated. A defensible UETA audit trail typically includes:
Some platforms package this as a "certificate of completion" PDF attached to the signed document. Others store it separately and offer export on demand.
