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Business-to-business electronic contracts provide a specification of the agreed value exchange and guarantee legal protection to companies during electronic trading relations. Important features that distinguish e-contracts from traditional paper contracts are the possibilities for automatic establishment and enactment, the more detailed e-contract content specification and the frequency of e-contract content updating. In this paper, we discuss these e-contract features and the technology requirements to which they lead. We describe two conceptual architectures for the support of updates in digitally signed e-contracts. We demonstrate that the straightforward approach is inefficient and therefore inadequate for supporting high update rates in an automated, dynamic, communication-intensive contract enactment environment. The second approach that we describe allows companies to handle e-contract updates in a …