This means warrants, contracts, etc hold up on court where a document that is emailed and printed off will not.
This is not a particularly good reason - but that is the bottom line.
There are definitely electronic forms of contracts that are legal without me ever having to put an ink pen on a dead tree.
I bought car insurance from Geico entirely online. Never signed anything or faxed anything. Just typed in my initials and checked some boxes ... only thing I had to print was the card that goes in my glove box.
Fax is still immensely important when dealing with credit applications, leases, etc.
Also in many places documents you print with an inkjet printer are not technically legal.
The laws regarding the technologies are mostly really dumb but that is what you usually get when law and technology meet.
I can say on good authority, as I paid lawyers good money for the legislation ( http://tinyurl.com/3xwvf5a ) and pertinent case-law research, that (commercially) emails with e-sigs in VA are just as good, in some cases, MUCH better than faxes due to the header meta-information.
What constitutes an "e-sig" under the Commercial Code of Virginia can also be very simple (nothing more than a "/s/ <full name> <title> <date>" line in documents) provided that both parties agree apriori that "sufficient notice" can be given over email.
Given the pace of business these days, to a first-order approximation, we simply won't do any kind of volume work with a client, vendor, or partner that doesn't support electronic document authorization. Faxes really are dinosaurs. We still maintain a dedicated fax line, but to my knowledge, it's not be utilized for over 4 years.