To Sign Or Not To Sign??? I have been reading the various posts about signing or not, ones letters to CRA's, OC's, and CA's. Some posts indicate there has been problems with not signing in which the other party sends back a demand for full identification. This is my take on the subject. First my apologies that this is a bit long. BACKGROUND - a few years ago a friend of mine, a plaintiff's attorney (PA), was responding to a discovery demand from defendant's attorney. The discovery amounted to tens of thousands of pages of documents. Plaintiff took it's time in getting documents to his attorney, which gave the attorney insufficient time to review documents. PA knew that defendant was going to scan documents into a searchable database. Long story short, PA photocopied documents onto red colored paper that had a grid mask printed on it printed at 25% gray mask. The desired effect was, when defendant's attorney scanned the documents the combination of the red paper plus the grid mask played havoc on the scanner. All that was scanned was gibberish. Needless to say, defendant's attorney was a little ticked off, but it bought the PA some time. Now for the question at hand, I know we are not going to use red paper or go to the expense of having customized stationary printed, but there are a couple of things we can do. 1. Do not sign - that is a given. 2. Pilot makes a fine point highlighter in blue that will not reproduce when scanned or photocopied. Office supply stores have them. Sign documents with them. 3. Scan your signature, save it as a file. If you have a color printer, insert it in the document, print the signature in light blue, most of the time, light blue will not reproduce. But this is not always fool proof. 4. Have an embosser made and emboss all original documents. 5. Now the best for lost. Create a letterhead template in your word processor. Immediately following the closing, type the following text: "TODAYS DATE <INSERT YOUR NAME> TODAYS DATA. Repeat the same text for about half a page width, and then repeat for several lines long. Not select the entire text, change the font size to "5", i.e. really small, while still selected, change the font color to light gray. On the next line, in normal sized font type your name in black. Before you print the document, in your word processors FIND & REPLACE function chose to change TODAYS DATE to the actual current date. When you sign the document, use blue ink. This will have two effects, one, you will have taken ownership of your document, second, when the original is printed the light gray area is not that noticeable to the eye, but if the document is scanned the grayed area will over shadow the signature, plus the date will indicate the true signing date and not some prior date if the CA is trying to forge an application. If you have questions email me directly and I can send you a MS Word template.
