You are allowed under the Electronic Communications Act 2000 to substitute electronic for paper on legal documents, with several clauses about how. (this is derived from EU directives) You should also take a look at the Civil Evidence Act 1995 (S8 & S9 being the key parts) There is case law supporting contracting in England & Wales via e-mail, but I found no case law (last time I looked) on the rest of the affected areas, and the one case covered purely the ability to contract, there was no dispute over the contents, etc. I would suggest investigating a solution along the lines of implement electronic documents per the BIP008:2004 standard, and get the corporate risk manager and council solictor to sign off on the risks the grey areas pose. If you have a decent IT department, they should be up together with the relevant technical issues required to support legal elctonic documents, and be able to advise on the relevant risks for challenging electronic evidence currently and in the foreseeable future. The one area I would worry about is accessibility.
