How do you sign your emails? If your name and contact details
are automatically generated at the bottom of an e-mail, do you
consider you have signed the e-mail and should be contractually
bound by the contents? This was the issue for the county court in
the recent case of Neocleous v Rees.
The facts
The defendants had agreed to transfer a part of their land to
the claimants for the price of £175,000. The terms of the
agreement were recorded in a chain of emails sent between the
parties’ solicitors. Each email in the chain was signed off
using an automated corporate signature tool which recorded the
name, role and contact details of the solicitors. Under law, a
contract for the sale of land must be in writing, incorporate all
the terms of the contract and must be signed by or on behalf of
each party. The claimants argued that the email chain comprised a
contract which had been signed by the insertion of an automatically
generated footer containing the name and
