We live in a digital age where many companies are going paperless or paper-light. Because of this, the world of document signing is evolving, and people are increasingly looking to sign documents without printing out, copying, or scanning papers. Many electronic signatures services like DocuSign® are now offered, and even important legal documents are now being signed electronically.

To help make patent and trademark filings more convenient for applicants, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has adopted rules to allow for electronic signing of documents. Even important documents, like the Declaration, can be signed electronically. However, the USPTO has a few requirements to ensure that your documents are properly accepted. These requirements go beyond what might be required even in other legal contexts.

An electronic signature, or S-signature as it is called by the USPTO, is any signature other than a handwritten “wet” signature or copy of such a handwritten signature. This includes typed signatures as well as images of handwritten signatures provided by services like DocuSign®. The requirements for an S-signature by a patent applicant include:

1) The S-signature can be composed of only letters, Arabic numerals, and/or punctuation (for example, spaces, commas, periods, and the like).

2) The signer’s name must be specific enough to reasonably identify the signer and be presented near the S-signature.

3) The S-signature needs to be personally placed, by the signer, between forward slash marks.

That last requirement is the one that is least intuitive to clients and patent professionals. Although the rule is not intuitive, it is still requirement for proper USPTO S-signatures. Because of this, we are encouraging clients to follow the rule strictly.

Summary: to help meet this requirement while minimizing disruption to your workflow, we recommend adding slash marks to signature lines by default. Then, each signer just needs to insert their electronic signature between the appropriate slash marks. This solution also works fine if the signer decides to sign their document in the traditional way since the USPTO will accept “wet” signatures between slash marks.