• How valuable is NDA automation to your business?
My company uses a third- party outsourcing company for NDA automation. The third-party outsourcing company used by my company guarantees to review the NDA within 48 hours and have been reliable to respond within that time period. They also have provided form NDAs to be used by our business teams that have been signed off by our legal department. Unless you are a legal department with tiers of legal experience and have very junior attorneys that can review NDAs, NDA review is not the best use of the legal department’s times particularly at their salary/pay rate. Therefore, I find it valuable if your company produces or negotiates a high volume of NDAs from a time and cost perspective. However, if your company does not produce a high volume of NDAs it (e.g., third party outsourcing company) may not be worth the cost value in comparison to the amount of time the attorneys spend on the NDAs.
• How automated is your NDA workflow today, and where do you see opportunities for improvement?
We have a SOP document that sets forth the steps to engage the third-party NDA provider. And an additional form the business teams complete with the specific NDA information for review or to be prepared. The business teams e-mail the additional form to a specific e-mail created by the third-party NDA provider solely for our company’s work.
Our business team doesn’t know the third-party NDA providers and do not trust them in general as they don’t know their skill set so they often come to the in-house lawyers with questions instead of working directly with the third-party NDA provider. The third-party NDA provider has not thoroughly trained its engaged lawyers on our company’s risk tolerance, so the third-party NDA providers often reach out to the in-house lawyer with questions based on responses from the other side. If the third -party NDA provider has several questions that must be responded to by the in-house lawyers, the in-house lawyers could spend that time negotiating the NDA on their own.
• Would a more pre-configured/out-of-the-box NDA automation product help increase adoption across your business? (“Dear sales team, today we’re launching AutoNDA, designed to streamline the NDA request and signature process”)
It would depend on how well-trained the business team was trained on completing the questions that need to be answered to pre-configure the correct NDA form (mutual, unilateral, purpose, etc.), and how much time it will take to continually train business teams based on the growth and changes to the team so the in house lawyers are bogged down with premature questions that would take almost equivalent time to respond to as to review the NDA.
• Any other insights or perspectives you’d like to share on the topic of NDA automations?
I think if the NDA is not automated by computer or other programming, the NDA outsourcing provider needs to take the time to really learn the business and the people so they understand the risk tolerance and trust building.
1. NDA automation is critical. Most clients I have served experience that NDAs are the bulk of all "contract" requests. This process should be as "self-service" as possible for the client given the purpose of NDAs to initiate discussions with customers and vendors.
How automated is your NDA workflow today, and where do you see opportunities for improvement? My current employer has a substantially automated process. However, the process could be improved if my internal client could be given some reasonable parameters to agree with certain redlines. The idea is to move NDAs along quickly to avoid the need to engage legal review. If a company's general NDA is unreasonable in terms of one-sidedness from the outset, it may see significantly more NDA review traffic. If an NDA process could be established that builds in certainly pre-approved alternative clauses made accessible to the requestor, I can see this making the process a much better experience all while empowering the client. Of course, certain portions of the NDA could be "locked" and note to the client that any changes to this section will be require legal review.
3. Yes, this would be helpful so long as training and empowerment occur and the Legal team is brought in to assist with any flexibility it can offer to the internal customer.
4. NDAs are usually what I call, the doorway to an improved CLM process. Each company I have worked for has implemented a self-service NDA process as initial adoption to CLM.
1 - NDAs should be automated whenever possible given their sheer volume.
2 - The NDA process at my current company is almost fully automated except for when the counterparty pushes back with certain edits. I think having different versions of NDAs would be a fix for some of these common counter-edits. For example, have a form NDA to be used by insurance vendors, another NDA for engagements involving IP/work product, etc. If these alternate/special forms are built with care, the counter-edits could be easily managed or avoided all together.
3 - Absolutely, assuming it can be slightly tweaked to fit the needs of the business.
4 - NDA automation is the easiest solution to stand up for early CLM projects. If you can launch the NDA automation project successfully, you greatly increase the likelihood of adoption for more complex contract automation projects.
Thanks, Jason. I think your point #4 is really important. If this is the best place to start for broad CLM adoption, why not make it easy for a company unbundle and get started here at a more approachable price point? Thanks for the great feedback!
We have no use case for NDAs here, so I don't have much to share other than I like the idea of that being a separate product/feature that could be unbundled in terms of pricing.
1 - I think NDAs are not a good use of Legal's time, so I'm all for automating NDAs fully. I have co-workers that disagree with me on this, however. There are concerns with having duplicate NDAs in place with the same counterparty, and with less personal touch/flexibility with VIP clients.
2 - For my current company, it is not automated beyond having an intake form process that routes to the person who processes NDAs. I'd love a fully self-serve option for the business users, where they can input the basics needed (counterparty legal name, effective date, signatory name/email) and have it executed by the counterparty (DocuSign, click-through acceptance/click-wrap, or some other method) without having to touch it again. I'd want to be able to see status in the CLM, and would want a process to handle pre-approved fallbacks or certain NDA flavors (unilateral vs. mutual; different purposes; different governing laws, etc.).
3 - YES!
4 - NDAs are high volume and generally pretty standard. This should be an automation opportunity that most business should be able to get on board with (eventually).
For a prior company, we fully automated NDAs (click-through acceptance) and it was so nice. That company had a lot of negotiating leverage, however, so there wasn't much push-back on accepting the terms as-is.
Mindy, great feedback. A few comments in response:
1. I appreciate there will be certain people on a legal team that won't want to adopt this type of automation even for NDA, and I also suspect they may not generally be great CLM buyers/power users of CLM. Feel free to correct me on that.
2. Fully-self service for business users would be the plan, for sure. End to end. And this is also where a more friendly (zero cost) business user license would be helpful.
3. In regards to "CLM flavors" and playbooks, one thing we're considering is using something like OneNDA.org or other open source template to help standardize the process. Either way, we appreciate that within the self serve model, there needs to be some playbook configuration both for NDA type (mutual, governing law, etc) and for standard fallbacks to help streamline the full process.
NDA automation, while certainly useful, probably wouldn't be a huge need in our organization currently. We don't sign many of them (historically we would decline to sign them) and if we do as it relates to our own sales process, then we'll only do our own standard NDA without redlines.
Currently it's integrated in Salesforce where a Sales Manager can trigger it to be sent for signature and then is saved back on the Salesforce Opportunity and will flow down into our CLM. Sorry don't have much further to add given that, at least in our business, it's not a huge need at this time.
Greg, to the contrary, I'd say you already have an automated NDA process in place (which is great). A couple of questions re Salesforce (SFDC) integration. When a Sales Manager requests an NDA today via SFDC how much configuration is happening behind the scenes? Are they inputting specific fields? Are they answering questions that might influence which version of your NDA is generated? Thank you sir!
We only have one NDA version they can send so that's all that can be triggered We had our in-house SF team implement the integration with our eSign provider and it was pretty out of the box. The sales manager is mainly just inputting the name and email of who it will be routed to for signature at the prospect and then it comes back to me for signature after the prospect has signed.
I guess I just said it's not a huge issue on our end because we're mainly doing it for the customer and to assuage their concerns about talking to us about their business and most of our customers don't even ask for one. I'd say we sign one on less than 1% of our potential deals.
This is great! Like we've discussed, I think your use case for CLM is pretty unique (and pretty cool). And that certainly is evident here and how your business manages NDA automation. In any event, this is very helpful for us to understand how NDAs even get automated in a low volume environment. Thank you again!
• How valuable is NDA automation to your business?
My company uses a third- party outsourcing company for NDA automation. The third-party outsourcing company used by my company guarantees to review the NDA within 48 hours and have been reliable to respond within that time period. They also have provided form NDAs to be used by our business teams that have been signed off by our legal department. Unless you are a legal department with tiers of legal experience and have very junior attorneys that can review NDAs, NDA review is not the best use of the legal department’s times particularly at their salary/pay rate. Therefore, I find it valuable if your company produces or negotiates a high volume of NDAs from a time and cost perspective. However, if your company does not produce a high volume of NDAs it (e.g., third party outsourcing company) may not be worth the cost value in comparison to the amount of time the attorneys spend on the NDAs.
• How automated is your NDA workflow today, and where do you see opportunities for improvement?
We have a SOP document that sets forth the steps to engage the third-party NDA provider. And an additional form the business teams complete with the specific NDA information for review or to be prepared. The business teams e-mail the additional form to a specific e-mail created by the third-party NDA provider solely for our company’s work.
Our business team doesn’t know the third-party NDA providers and do not trust them in general as they don’t know their skill set so they often come to the in-house lawyers with questions instead of working directly with the third-party NDA provider. The third-party NDA provider has not thoroughly trained its engaged lawyers on our company’s risk tolerance, so the third-party NDA providers often reach out to the in-house lawyer with questions based on responses from the other side. If the third -party NDA provider has several questions that must be responded to by the in-house lawyers, the in-house lawyers could spend that time negotiating the NDA on their own.
• Would a more pre-configured/out-of-the-box NDA automation product help increase adoption across your business? (“Dear sales team, today we’re launching AutoNDA, designed to streamline the NDA request and signature process”)
It would depend on how well-trained the business team was trained on completing the questions that need to be answered to pre-configure the correct NDA form (mutual, unilateral, purpose, etc.), and how much time it will take to continually train business teams based on the growth and changes to the team so the in house lawyers are bogged down with premature questions that would take almost equivalent time to respond to as to review the NDA.
• Any other insights or perspectives you’d like to share on the topic of NDA automations?
I think if the NDA is not automated by computer or other programming, the NDA outsourcing provider needs to take the time to really learn the business and the people so they understand the risk tolerance and trust building.
1. NDA automation is critical. Most clients I have served experience that NDAs are the bulk of all "contract" requests. This process should be as "self-service" as possible for the client given the purpose of NDAs to initiate discussions with customers and vendors.
How automated is your NDA workflow today, and where do you see opportunities for improvement? My current employer has a substantially automated process. However, the process could be improved if my internal client could be given some reasonable parameters to agree with certain redlines. The idea is to move NDAs along quickly to avoid the need to engage legal review. If a company's general NDA is unreasonable in terms of one-sidedness from the outset, it may see significantly more NDA review traffic. If an NDA process could be established that builds in certainly pre-approved alternative clauses made accessible to the requestor, I can see this making the process a much better experience all while empowering the client. Of course, certain portions of the NDA could be "locked" and note to the client that any changes to this section will be require legal review.
3. Yes, this would be helpful so long as training and empowerment occur and the Legal team is brought in to assist with any flexibility it can offer to the internal customer.
4. NDAs are usually what I call, the doorway to an improved CLM process. Each company I have worked for has implemented a self-service NDA process as initial adoption to CLM.
1 - NDAs should be automated whenever possible given their sheer volume.
2 - The NDA process at my current company is almost fully automated except for when the counterparty pushes back with certain edits. I think having different versions of NDAs would be a fix for some of these common counter-edits. For example, have a form NDA to be used by insurance vendors, another NDA for engagements involving IP/work product, etc. If these alternate/special forms are built with care, the counter-edits could be easily managed or avoided all together.
3 - Absolutely, assuming it can be slightly tweaked to fit the needs of the business.
4 - NDA automation is the easiest solution to stand up for early CLM projects. If you can launch the NDA automation project successfully, you greatly increase the likelihood of adoption for more complex contract automation projects.
Thanks, Jason. I think your point #4 is really important. If this is the best place to start for broad CLM adoption, why not make it easy for a company unbundle and get started here at a more approachable price point? Thanks for the great feedback!
We have no use case for NDAs here, so I don't have much to share other than I like the idea of that being a separate product/feature that could be unbundled in terms of pricing.
Thanks, John. Are there any other examples of features that if unbundled would serve your business better than the NDA example? Thanks!
The only other thing I have seen that I can think of right now is that some CLMs offer a lot more detailed analytics than what we really need.
1 - I think NDAs are not a good use of Legal's time, so I'm all for automating NDAs fully. I have co-workers that disagree with me on this, however. There are concerns with having duplicate NDAs in place with the same counterparty, and with less personal touch/flexibility with VIP clients.
2 - For my current company, it is not automated beyond having an intake form process that routes to the person who processes NDAs. I'd love a fully self-serve option for the business users, where they can input the basics needed (counterparty legal name, effective date, signatory name/email) and have it executed by the counterparty (DocuSign, click-through acceptance/click-wrap, or some other method) without having to touch it again. I'd want to be able to see status in the CLM, and would want a process to handle pre-approved fallbacks or certain NDA flavors (unilateral vs. mutual; different purposes; different governing laws, etc.).
3 - YES!
4 - NDAs are high volume and generally pretty standard. This should be an automation opportunity that most business should be able to get on board with (eventually).
For a prior company, we fully automated NDAs (click-through acceptance) and it was so nice. That company had a lot of negotiating leverage, however, so there wasn't much push-back on accepting the terms as-is.
Mindy, great feedback. A few comments in response:
1. I appreciate there will be certain people on a legal team that won't want to adopt this type of automation even for NDA, and I also suspect they may not generally be great CLM buyers/power users of CLM. Feel free to correct me on that.
2. Fully-self service for business users would be the plan, for sure. End to end. And this is also where a more friendly (zero cost) business user license would be helpful.
3. In regards to "CLM flavors" and playbooks, one thing we're considering is using something like OneNDA.org or other open source template to help standardize the process. Either way, we appreciate that within the self serve model, there needs to be some playbook configuration both for NDA type (mutual, governing law, etc) and for standard fallbacks to help streamline the full process.
NDA automation, while certainly useful, probably wouldn't be a huge need in our organization currently. We don't sign many of them (historically we would decline to sign them) and if we do as it relates to our own sales process, then we'll only do our own standard NDA without redlines.
Currently it's integrated in Salesforce where a Sales Manager can trigger it to be sent for signature and then is saved back on the Salesforce Opportunity and will flow down into our CLM. Sorry don't have much further to add given that, at least in our business, it's not a huge need at this time.
Greg, to the contrary, I'd say you already have an automated NDA process in place (which is great). A couple of questions re Salesforce (SFDC) integration. When a Sales Manager requests an NDA today via SFDC how much configuration is happening behind the scenes? Are they inputting specific fields? Are they answering questions that might influence which version of your NDA is generated? Thank you sir!
We only have one NDA version they can send so that's all that can be triggered We had our in-house SF team implement the integration with our eSign provider and it was pretty out of the box. The sales manager is mainly just inputting the name and email of who it will be routed to for signature at the prospect and then it comes back to me for signature after the prospect has signed.
I guess I just said it's not a huge issue on our end because we're mainly doing it for the customer and to assuage their concerns about talking to us about their business and most of our customers don't even ask for one. I'd say we sign one on less than 1% of our potential deals.
This is great! Like we've discussed, I think your use case for CLM is pretty unique (and pretty cool). And that certainly is evident here and how your business manages NDA automation. In any event, this is very helpful for us to understand how NDAs even get automated in a low volume environment. Thank you again!