Security and evidentiary integrity
Every Notice of Commencement and lien waiver e-signed through NOC Signatures is protected by SHA-256 hashes of the original and final PDFs, signer IP and user-agent capture, an append-only audit log, and a Certificate of Completion auto-appended to every signed document. The result: an e-signature that holds up to scrutiny from a county clerk, a lender, or a court.
An e-signature is only as good as the evidence sitting behind it. If a county clerk, a lender, or opposing counsel questions a signature, the question is never whether a picture of a signature exists — it is who applied it, when, from where, and whether the document changed afterwards. Every signing event records:
We compute SHA-256 hashes of both the original and the completed PDF. Because a hash changes completely if a single byte changes, the pair proves the signed document is the document that was signed. Final downloads also carry a certifying signature that locks the page content, so any later edit is flagged by the PDF reader rather than passing silently. The documents are not encrypted — county recording systems have to be able to read them.
Sending, opening, viewing, and signing are each written to an audit log that is only ever appended to. Nothing in the product edits or deletes an audit entry, so the sequence of events on a document can be reconstructed later and reads the same way every time it is examined.
Every signed PDF gets a Certificate of Completion appended to it, summarising the signer identity, the timestamps, the IP address, and the document hashes in one page. That single page is usually what a lender or an attorney asks for, and it travels with the document instead of living in a database only you can query.
Electronic signatures are enforceable under the federal E-SIGN Act (15 U.S.C. § 7001 et seq.) and, in Florida, the Uniform Electronic Transaction Act (Fla. Stat. § 668.50). Both give an electronic signature the same legal effect as a handwritten one, provided the signer intended to sign and the record is retained in a form that can be accurately reproduced.
For a Notice of Commencement specifically, the electronic signature satisfies the signing requirement, but it does not replace notarization or recording. The signed PDF still goes to a notary and then to the Clerk of the Circuit Court in the county where the property is located.
Clerks record the notarized document you present. The practical requirement is that the NOC is complete, on an acceptable form, properly notarized, and legible. Electronic signing addresses how the owner signed; notarization and recording still follow the county's normal process.
Two things. The stored SHA-256 hash will not match an altered file, and the certifying seal applied at download makes the alteration visible in any standards-compliant PDF reader.
Yes. The audit trail and the Certificate of Completion are regenerated from the stored record, and signed documents are frozen at signing so a later template change cannot alter what was signed.
This page describes how the product handles evidence and integrity. It is general information, not legal advice about the admissibility of any particular signature.