Articles

In 2025, the electronic signature was often questioned in court, with a clear expansion into the B to B leasing sector, which until now seemed to be spared from litigation in this area. The financial stakes remain low, but the judges have gained experience, which has resulted in refusals to recognise the electronic signature for poorly argued cases. On the dark side, legal actors are unable to distinguish between the elements that characterize a qualified (presumed reliable) and unqualified electronic signature. This is worrying because "real" qualified electronic signatures are beginning to appear on the market and one may wonder whether this difficulty will not lead to rejections of qualified electronic signatures even though the professionals who implement them expect the greatest judicial certainty, since they are presumed to be reliable.

the Court of Appeal of Pau (CA Pau, February 12, 2026, RG n°25/01900) has just issued a very interesting decision relating to the place of conclusion of an electronically signed contract. In that judgment, which concerned an employment contract, it considered that opting for the place of physical location of one or the other of the parties to designate the place of conclusion of the contract does not make sense, because that alleged location results from an IP address, which can be changed or falsified, and adopting that position would lead to a high degree of legal uncertainty.
The impact of this decision is directly related to the question of the law applicable to the contract and/or the competent court when, in the event that the parties had the freedom to choose them, they did not do so.
This is a first, and a very interesting one!

The NIS2 directive soon to be transposed in France, the CRA regulation on cybersecurity, and the DORA regulation on the cyber resilience of the financial sector are either already in force or in the process of being in force. They organize a cybersecurity ecosystem that almost all SaaS publishers must comply with, at the cost of a fairly considerable compliance effort: complex texts to decode, notification obligations in all directions, documentation, operational implementation, etc. To begin with, we give you what you need to know about their applicability to your service

The European eIDAS V2 Regulation, published in 2024, is best known for the creation of an European wallet comprising standardized digital identity functions. But it has also added to the list of the trust services, such as electronic signature or electronic seal, a "qualified archiving service" which has just taken on its full materiality with the publication on December 16, 2025 of the implementing regulation defining its reference standard.

The Data Act has been applicable since September 12, 2025, and it does not only apply to connected data from the IoT. It also targets all European added service providers in SaaS mode, for example in the field of EDM, accounting, invoicing, archiving, etc. which will now have to allow their customers to terminate for convenience at any time and a reversibility whose scope is difficult to apprehend. It is not just a tool for digital sovereignty. It is also a text with dangerous side effects for national European suppliers, sometimes fragile, whose customers are offered on a platter the possibility of switching to competition, why not American...
The Data Act does not apply to ongoing contracts, which some companies, and even their lawyers, seem to be unaware of, as they see this text as a free and perfect opportunity to terminate a contract or to require the provision of information not provided for in the contract. They must moderate themselves, because the Data Act only applies to contracts concluded after September 12, 2025, which must now include clauses that make it possible to best adjust the provisions of the text.

In May 2025, we published an article on this site entitled: "Electronic signature, judges are rebelling". Well, they are fighting back even more because the trend is continuing. Since then, many decisions concerning electronic signature have been handed down by courts of appeal, including a good number of refusals which, for the first time, concern professional leasing and real estate loans.
Their analysis is rich in lessons.

Under French law, the definition of an electronic signature (Art. 1367 Al.2 Civil Code) implies a "link" between the act and the signature identifying its author. This notion of link is also found in the definition of the advanced signature in the European eIDAS Regulation (Art. 26) which states that the advanced signature must be "unequivocally linked to the signatory". But the meaning of this link is not obvious. We believe that it can be understood according to three approaches: a conceptual approach that projects onto the electronic signature a characteristic of the handwritten signature; a technical approach defining it via the electronic signature technology; and finally an opportunistic approach linked to the development of the on-the-fly certificate and the notion of evidence file, widely adopted by French judges.

Over the period from the end of March to mid-April 2025, the Courts of Appeal issued about fifteen decisions on electronic signatures. Nearly half of them refuse to acknowledge the signing of the contract electronically, which is an exceptionally high ratio compared to what we used to see. We have analysed these negative decisions

Digital accessibility is an obligation for all e_commerce sites for new services from June 28, 2025. Existing "similar" services have an additional 5 years to comply with these obligations. But what is a "similar" service really?

Decisions relating to electronic signatures are increasing in number. More than 200 decisions on the subject were handed down by appeal courts in 2024, twice as many as the previous year. This trend is only likely to continue as the use of electronic signatures becomes widespread across all sectors.