The ink on the acquisition agreement documents signed – perhaps electronically – by Adobe and e-signature technology company EchoSign hasn’t even dried yet, and already dark clouds appear on the horizon.

An EchoSign rival called RPost, a self-proclaimed pioneer of electronic signature services, is suing Adobe and EchoSign over patent infringement.

RPost, founded in 2000, says it brought suit for the infringement of five of its U.S. patents – numbers 6,182,219; 6,571,334; 7,707,624; 7,865,557 and 7,966,372.

The patents cover technologies of verifiable proof for email delivery, recording recipient consent associated with received messages and documents, and value-added outbound email processing.

According to the lawsuit documents, embedded below, RPost is asking the US Federal Court to issue an injunction against Adobe to prevent further damages. If the court follows their reasoning, such an injunction would render the Adobe’s purchase of EchoSign potentially worthless.

RPost’s services provide senders legally valid evidence of email content, timestamp and delivery, with options to record the recipient’s consent to attached contracts with legal e-signatures.

This isn’t the first time RPost embarks on a legal crusade against its competitors, and even national postal services haven’t been spared.

RPost currently has actions pending against EchoSign challenger Docusign – which yesterday announced that it has processed more than a half billion signed pages to date – as well the United States Postal Service, the Swiss Post Office and the Canadian Post Office.

RPost says it owns 35 patents worldwide, some of which have priority over technology dating back to 1995.

The timing of the lawsuit raises questions, but I asked RPost CEO Zafar Khan why the documents were filed on the very same day Adobe announced the acquisition of EchoSign, and this is how he responded:

Electronically signing a document is not difficult. Just typing your name at the bottom of a document or email can have all the legal force of a handwritten signature if all parties have proof that you are the author of the specific content. At first, we had viewed EchoSign’s electronic signature service more of a novelty — a cosmetic way of placing your typewritten name in a fancy font and calling it an EchoSign electronic signature.

But, in light of recent marketplace demand for a higher level of forensically verifiable proof surrounding electronically signed documents — proof with an audit trail and method of verifying authenticity — we found that Echosign upgraded its services based on the teachings published in RPost patents.

RPost patented technology focuses on producing electronic signatures on documents in a manner that has high evidential weight, including an audit trail, associating this to the e-mail and e-signed document record, and providing methods of authentication. Without this, you don’t have proof.

When we discovered that EchoSign’s service included key elements of RPost patented technology, we recently re-evaluated EchoSign and realized that they added technology to make their e-signature service more legally meaningful – and we identified that technology as key elements of RPost patented technology. We reviewed in the context of our patents, and this has taken several months to complete, as the RPost patent portfolio includes 35 patents.

We were in the final stages of filing last week, and just finalized the details today.

Fighting words indeed.

We’ve reached out to Adobe and EchoSign and will update when we hear back.

Update: Adobe says it won’t comment on pending litigation.

Adobe this morning announced that it has acquired EchoSign, a provider of electronic signature solutions and signature automation.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the founders as well as all full-time employees of EchoSign, which has offices in Palo Alto, California, the UK and Germany, will join Adobe.

EchoSign’s solution, which is said to currently support more than three million users worldwide, will be offered as part of Adobe’s online document exchange services platform and be integrated with Adobe’s SendNow for managed file transfer, FormsCentral for form creation and CreatePDF for online PDF creation.

EchoSign’s electronic signature service lets you append digital signatures to contracts and other business documents, store them in digital form, and manage those documents without printing them out and faxing them. Currently, EchoSign has 30,000 enterprise customers using the service, including Dell, BT, Google, Facebook, OpenTable, Groupon, Intuit, Delta, Orange, Aetna, Time Warner Cable, Qualcomm, Citrix, Symantec, and Netsuite.

The web identity feature is designed to help provide an easy way to confirm identity in a transaction and help you tie their social graph to you e-signatures. Your social graph is automatically captured by EchoSign and attached to PDF copies of every signed contract, along with your email address, IP address, signature image, and chronological transaction history. While there’s no extra cost to use EchoSign web identity, you can also disable the feature.

EchoSign, launched back in 2006, has reached 2.2 million users, up from 1.2 million users earlier this year.

While EchoSign’s desktop application is Flash based, its mobile site will now support HTML5. For EchoSign, the switch to HTML5 is party of of a greater mobile strategy to encourage more users to used their mobile devices for e-signatures. In fact, almost 10% of EchoSign users sign contracts on mobile devices. And tablet devices like the iPad are ideal for viewing and signing documents. The dramatic success of the iPad in the enterprise has pushed EchoSign to take mobile signatures to the next level.

EchoSign’s new release also enables handwritten, biometric signatures straight from mobile Safari and Chrome. Previously, only typed and synthetic signatures were fully supported on mobile device.

EchoSign, launched back in 2006, has reached 1.2 million users and has also helped sign and close more than $300 million worth of contracts in one month. Corporate customers include Dell, Google, TimeWarner and Qualcomm.

To date, EchoSign has raised $8.5 million in funding. The startup faces competition from DocuSign and VeriSign.

EchoSign, the web-based electronic signatures and signature automation service, has launched a nifty Twitter integration to let users “ring the bell” on Twitter the moment a deal is signed and closed. EchoSign will auto-tweet the moment a deal is signed, and will Tweet how quickly a deal was closed.

The startup is also launching a contest to incentivize the use of Twitter when signing deals via EchoSign and will reward the top closer and quickest closer each month with gift cards and prizes. Echosign is used for a variety of transactions, including those in real estate deals, sales contracts and in human resources activities. Of course, its important to note that users may not want to Tweet out their deals to the public for privacy reasons.

EchoSign, launched back in 2006, has reached 1.2 million users and has also helped sign and close more than $200,000,000 worth of contracts in one month.

EchoSign’s electronic signature service lets you append digital signatures to contracts and other business documents, store them in digital form, and manage those documents without printing them out and faxing them. The startup has a freemium model, where the you can use a basic service for free but pay anywhere from $14.95 to $300 per month for a subscription service that includes extra features such as PDF encryption and password protections. EchoSign has gained traction as more businesses adopted SaaS and cloud computing applications. For example, EchoSign has gained significant popularity on Salesforce’s App Exchange. EchoSign is also integrated with web-based productivity suite Zoho.

To date, EchoSign has raised $8.5 million in funding. The startup faces competition from DocuSign and VeriSign.

EchoSign, the web-based electronic signatures and signature automation service, has surpassed one million users. The startup, which launched back in 2006, has also helped sign and close more than $200,000,000 worth of contracts in one month.

EchoSign’s electronic signature service lets you append digital signatures to contracts and other business documents, store them in digital form, and manage those documents without printing them out and faxing them. The startup has a freemium model, where the you can use a basic service for free but pay anywhere from $14.95 to $300 per month for a subscription service that includes extra features such as PDF encryption and password protections.

EchoSign’s CEO and co-founder Jason Lemkin says that the electronic signature movement experienced momentum as more businesses adopted SaaS and cloud computing applications. For example, EchoSign has gained significant popularity on Salesforce’s App Exchange. EchoSign is also integrated with web-based productivity suite Zoho.

To date, EchoSign has raised $8.5 million in funding. The startup faces competition from DocuSign and VeriSign.

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=4272857&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1

EchoSign: The Way the Web Signs from FromEchoSign on Vimeo.

Austin-based Mumboe, originally founded in 2005 as FineTooth, has recently relaunched as another SAS contract management tool. It is similar to Negonation, in that it doesn’t handle eSignatures, but the contracts themselves. FineTooth’s original software solution used natural language analysis to help manage contracts by extracting the important details from contracts. Mumboe, short for the mumbo jumbo found in most contracts, lets companies create contracts from templates, share, search, and track important milestones. The company currently has a three month free trial.

EchoSign helps you keep executed documents organized. Document writing and negotiation has been largely handled online, via emails, for the last ten years (before that, fedex and faxing of versions back and forth was the way to go). However, when it comes time to execute a final agreement, both sides generally print the document and fax it back to the other side. Unless someone scans the signature pages and creates a pdf, there is no electronic signed copy.

Efax helps somewhat and I often ask people to send docs to my efax number so that I have an electronic copy. But Echosign, besides being free, goes further. Once a document is finalized, you simply upload it to the site and use their interface to email it out to everyone. The emailed document includes a fax cover sheet with the fax number pre-filled. The other side simply prints it, signs it, and sends it to the fax number on the pre-printed form. The original party then receives a pdf version of the signed document for filing, printing and/or forwarding.

I have no idea what the business model is, since its a free service, but EchoSign definitely fixes a big problem for lawyers and companies trying to keep executed agreements and other documents organized.

I’ve looked at other services that are trying to solve the version control of documents…hosting a word or other document that the parties can change and finalize is a great idea and something law firms would easily pay for. Writely and the other ajax office application companies would tweak their services to accomplish this of course. In the meantime, I would really like to see EchoSign create an API and allow services like writely to built the signature piece right in.