My lawyer once told me that I should be careful with verbal commitments since a verbal commitment can often be construed as a binding agreement. The question is how to verify the verbal agreement and enforce non-repudiation?
There are many cases in life where you want to be able to verify a verbal commitment using a trusted third party in order to prevent the other side from repudiating/reneging on the agreement.
You’re doing a sales transaction over the phone, you have a face to face meeting and it ends with verbal agreement and a handshake, you have an accident and you agree terms verbally with the other party, you are in a divorce process and agreed verbally on money and custody issues.
I always thought that this would be a great application for a mobile service provider – you could call up a third party verification number and the two parties would state their names and ID numbers and agree into the phone for a digital recording that would get a timestamp and reference number.
Data Exchange is a company in Tulsa Oklahoma that provides the ability to protect verbal agreements with third party verification.