Searching for a way to set up legal signing with Gravity Forms?

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to set up legal signing with Gravity Forms using the Legal Signing add-on from CosmicGiant (formerly ForGravity).

You’ll be able to build full legal signing workflows and even generate a signed PDF document at the end of the process, complete with a signature audit trail.

While this add-on does come from a third-party developer, it is still a Gravity Forms Certified Add-On, which means that the Gravity Forms team has verified the quality of the developer and the add-on.

We’ve even covered it in detail ourselves in our complete Legal Signing for Gravity Forms review.

Ready to get started? Here’s our step-by-step guide on how to set up legal signing with Gravity Forms.

What You Need to Follow This Tutorial

To follow this tutorial, you’ll need the Legal Signing plugin from CosmicGiant (formerly ForGravity), alongside the core Gravity Forms plugin itself.

Rather than just collecting a signature as part of the form, Legal Signing lets you build workflows. For example, a single form could have multiple signers, each of which is required to sign the form before the workflow is complete.

Keeping with this example – you could send the form to the first person to sign. Then, once the first person signs the form, you could send an email notification prompting the second signer to sign the form.

Once the workflow is finished, Legal Signing can automatically generate a PDF version of the form, complete with all of the signatures.

Legal Signing also includes its own legal signature field, which eliminates the need to use the official Gravity Forms Signature Add-On (which is only available on the Elite license).

With this field, you can collect both typed and drawn signatures. It also offers user-friendly features such as letting users re-use their signature if a form requires multiple signatures (similar to how DocuSign works).

How to Set Up Legal Signing With Gravity Forms and CosmicGiant

Now, let’s get into the step-by-step guide for how to set up legal signing with Gravity Forms.

To follow this tutorial, you’ll need a minimum of two plugins:

1. The core Gravity Forms plugin – you can purchase any license if you don’t already have it.
2. Legal Signing for Gravity Forms from CosmicGiant – the plugin starts at $249 which includes most features. Higher tiers do include some added features such as the ability to import PDF documents as forms and export finished documents to Dropbox.

1. Prepare Your Document and Add Template

To kick things off, you’ll want to set up the PDF document that you want to sign as part of the form’s legal signing workflow.

You need to create a fillable PDF template so that Legal Signing knows where to add the signatures and other details.

To create this fillable PDF template, you can use Adobe Acrobat Pro (paid), PDFescape (free), or JotForm (free). If you’re not sure how to create this document, you can check out this help article.

Here’s what it might look like:

Once you have your fillable PDF, you can add it as a template in the plugin’s settings.

To start, go to Forms → Legal Signing → Templates → Add New.

Then:

1. Give it a name.
2. Add the fillable PDF template.
3. Click Create Template.

2. Create Your Form and Add Legal Signature Fields

Next, you’ll want to create the base form for your legal signing document, if you haven’t done so already.

Go to Forms → Add New and choose a blank form template.

For this tutorial, I’m just going to add the basic fields needed for a signature workflow. However, you could add more fields if needed – it really depends on your workflow.

For this example, we’ll assume that you need to collect signatures from two different people as part of your workflow. For each person, we’ll collect their…

1. Name.
2. Email address (so that you can send them signing notifications and have their contact details)
3. Signature

For the name and email address, you can use regular Gravity Forms fields.

For the signature field, you can add the Legal Signature field from the plugin, which you’ll find in the Advanced Fields section.

If you open the settings for the Legal Signature field, you can access some additional settings. For example, whether to allow drawn signatures, typed signatures, or both, as well as whether to collect the full name or just initials.

You can also control the design/style of the signature canvas in the Appearance settings.

You could then duplicate those fields for the second signer.

In addition to the Legal Signature field, the plugin also includes a Legal Consent field that provides details on eSignatures and requests consent.

If you want to be thorough, you could add a second page to your form that includes the Legal Consent field and asks for another signature from both signees (which form signers can re-fill with one click – there’s no need to manually set up their signature again).

4. Create a Legal Signing Feed

Once you’re with the form fields, you can set up a legal signing feed for your form:

1. Click Save Form to save your settings.
2. Expand the Settings menu and choose Legal Signing.
3. Click Add New to create a new feed.

Give it a name and then choose your PDF template from the PDF Template drop-down.

Then, enter an output file name to control the finished file format. You can include merge tags if needed.

You can also choose which email notifications to attach the signed PDF to.

Once you’ve made those choices, click Save Settings.

Then, click the Map Fields button to map the web form’s fields to your finished PDF document.

In the field mapping interface, you can map each signer’s signature and name to the relevant fillable field. You can also fill the date using the form’s metadata.

Once you’ve mapped the fields, click Apply & Close.

Then, click Save Settings again.

If you go to the Advanced Settings tab, you can also set up access to the PDF document, such as who can download it and any relevant passwords.

5. Set Up Your Legal Signing Workflow

Next, go to the Signing Workflow tab and click Enable Workflow to set up the legal signing workflow for this form.

The workflow is what lets you require the first signer to sign before the second signer.

First, set up your signers. You can designate signers based on an email field in your form, WordPress user accounts, and/or a custom email address.

Once you’ve added the signers, you can assign fields to each signer. You can also choose to hide form fields from other signers. However, even if you don’t hide them, those fields will still be disabled until the relevant signer is using the form.

Further down the page, you can optionally enable an audit trail certificate.

Then, you can set up the signing schedule. You can set up specific dates to sign on or relative dates based on the initial form submission or the last signing event.

Once you’re happy with the settings, click Save Settings.

6. Embed Form and Test

Now, you can embed the form on your site and do a test submission.

The first signer will start things off. While I didn’t hide the second signer fields in this example, those fields are disabled for the first signer.

On the second page, they can pre-fill their signature again just by clicking the button.

Then, the form will go to the second signer for signing, which they can access by clicking the special link in an email.

7. View Signing Details and Audit Trail

Once the document is fully signed, the signed PDF document will be attached to any relevant email notifications.

You can also access the signed PDF document from the Gravity Forms entry.

The entry detail also provides an audit trail for all of the signatures.

Set Up Legal Signing With Gravity Forms Today

That wraps up our guide on how to set up legal signing with Gravity Forms and the Legal Signing plugin.

If you’re ready to get started, you can purchase your copies of Gravity Forms and the Legal Signing add-on from CosmicGiant.

Then, follow this tutorial to get up and running.

If you’re interested in creating fillable PDFs like this but without the legal signing workflow, you also might be interested in our Gravity Forms to PDF tutorial. This tutorial shows you how to use CosmicGiant’s Fillable PDFs plugin to fill any type of PDF document. Legal Signing is based, in part, on Fillable PDFs, so the plugins do share some similarities.