Recipient groups provide a method for one member of a sender-defined group to respond to an agreement on behalf of the entire group. This allows the signature cycle to progress through team approvals without one person becoming a choke point for the process.

For example, if you have a legal team of five members that must sign off on an agreement, but any one member of that team is allowed to sign.

A recipient group can be created containing all five members.
All five members are notified when the agreement is ready for the team.
The first member to sign the agreement completes the team's obligation for that agreement.
All group members receive the final email notification when the agreement is completed.

There are two types of recipient groups in Acrobat Sign:

Reusable recipient groups are:

Predefined. The group must be created before the user attempts to add them to an agreement or workflow.
Configured by users in their user profile (under the Address book tab)
Scoped for individual, group, or organization-level access.
Available for senders through the address book auto-complete menu
Static when loaded. Senders cannot edit the names or email values of the group.

Note:

Access to recipient groups in general is controlled by the settings herein, but actually configuring a reusable group is done at the user level in the Personal Preferences menu. Please refer to the reusable recipient group article for more details.

Ad hoc recipient groups are:

Fully configured by senders at the time of configuration.
Useful for defining recipient groups with external signers that wouldn't be predefined.
One use only. They cannot be saved or shared for use in another application.

Availability:

Recipient groups are available for enterprise and business license plans.

Configuration scope:

The feature can be enabled at the account and group levels.

How it's used

Recipient groups are available to users who create agreements, web forms, and custom send workflows.

Typically, ad hoc recipients are used for external recipients, and internal groups are predefined as reusable groups to ensure the internal members are complete and controlled.

When a user starts to type in the group name, the address book presents all reusable groups matching the typed string that are available to the sender.

The Send page showing a recipient group with a partly typed in group name and the address book provided matches.

If the sender does not use a reusable recipient group, they then define an ad hoc recipient group by manually adding all of the group members by email address. The address book displays all addresses that match the typed-in string, and the user can select any one from the list at any time.

Configuration

The controls for this feature can be assessed by navigating to Account Settings > Send Settings > Recipient Groups

the Send Settings admin menu with the Recipient Group controls highlighted

When the feature is disabled, the Web form and Send composition pages don't include any method to add a recipient group.

The Send page highlighting the area where the Add Recipient Groups link is missing

When the feature is enabled, an Add Recipient Group link is inserted above the list of recipients.
The recipient record is converted into a recipient box that allows the user to add all of the recipient members that should be included in the group.

The Send page highlighting the Add Recipient Groups link and displaying the ad-hoc recipient group input fields

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Overview