What sort of contracts? In what jurisdiction? And for what purpose?

[The ABA guidelines are one place to start looking](http://www.abanet.org/scitech/ec/isc/dsg-tutorial.html).

If I were doing it I would save the actual contract portion of things as a text file that includes (text of agreement, HMAC of the text, signed HMAC, public key of the signer) note that including the public key of the signer in no way guarantees the authenticity of the signer; it's there purely as a sanity check, since if you can't decrypt the signed hmac with the provided public key and match the original hmac (or the derived hmac) the document is invalid.

Thanks for the link. I'm looking at it now.

> What sort of contracts?

I'm not sure how to answer this. It's basically an agreement saying we'll pay the authors X% of the proceeds from book sales every month.

We are a Delaware C corp.

Find a lawyer for the product team; not your corporate counsel, but someone whose sole responsibility is advising you on your contracts and recordkeeping requirements. From the sound of it someone who has experience in the publishing industry who has both written contracts and litigated disputes involving revenue sharing.

I have to wonder why you are doing this - are you really planning on having so many authors that you need a technical solution for this right now? Massive book publishers need that sort of thing but for a startup it seems unnecessary and a luxury. email the contracts in .pdf form, have them sign and return two copies, then mail one copy back to them.

I would just worry that you'll spend 40 hours developing a solution that will save you 5 hours a year.

Good point. I'm inclined to agree with you now. However, if the answer was something quick and easy, I would have done it.