Idea: Prebuilt & Supported MNDA workflow

David_Wieseneck

@kenneth_carter's idea of a standard MNDA is amazing. NDAs are a huge waste of legal time and resources.

https://community.ironcladapp.com/t5/Ironclad-Users-Forum/Free-Open-Source-Workflow-for-the-uNDA/m-p/264

But if my legal team wants to implement this, we need to figure out how to add it to Ironclad, figure out how to use it, and then figure out how we convince counterparties to accept it. That is a heavy lift. My legal team will just choose to do it the way they have always done it.

Ironclad should build this into the product as a pre-built & supported (read: updated) workflow for all Ironclad customers to opt-in and use.

Obviously not mandatory if a company wants to build their own workflow, but the power of defaults means that a lot of companies will just choose to use this standard. 

I don't care if it is the UNDA or the OneNDA , or maybe Ironclad want to built their own.

But Ironclad is an industry leader and holds a lot of influence with what they promote and include in the product. Ironclad moves the industry towards a more automated & collaborative future, this would be another huge step in that direction, by enabling more legal teams to adopt a standard.

The biggest obstacle that this idea has is the Cold Start Problem. But Ironclad is already promoting this idea (see this blog post), and with additional support and marketing, this could be come the standard across the industry.

kenneth_carter

This x 1,000,000.  If I never have to read another NDA again... I would have so much more time for productive activities.

The Law Boutique in the UK is already building the OneNDA into prepackaged products: https://www.axdraft.com/quickdocs-onenda?utm_campaign=onenda-launch&utm_source=mailchimp&utm_medium=email. 

However, I disagree about the uNDA v. the OneNDA.  Without regard to the specific legal terms, I think the the uNDA with its highly configurable template takes full advantage of the Ironclad digital-native contracting platform.  That makes it a much better choice.  The static OneNDA could just be a form in any signatory tool.  The uNDA in Ironclad lets you create dozens of versions of the standard contract to handle varied use case, using a negotiate-by-the-numbers approach.  

The uNDA is really a Trojan stalking horse's camel's nose in the tent. If the legal profession could get comfortable a standard suite of clauses for NDAs, then standardized clauses for MSAs and other routine commercial documents would not be far behind.

I agree that gaining a critical mass - a network externality problem - is the main impediment to getting this launched. If Ironclad were to follow the Law Boutique's approach and include the uNDA as a bundled feature, the very next day the uNDA would be an industry standard.  Using the uNDA is without cost, only benefit.  For example, if you send over your uNDA and the other side wants to negotiate the document, you are in no worse position if you had sent over your current template.  In fact, you may be better off in the long run since you have sent a document which by it nature is designed to be uncontroversial and therefore you have reduced the probability that the other side would puke on your NDA in the first place.  And, if one were really intend on wasting as much time as is possible, they could just delete the uNDA workflow from production and use their home-grown NDA.  Further, since the text is also open source, so if the collective wisdom of the crowd had better legal terms, then the uNDA would converge on those in short order.  This creates a virtuous circle of adoption, once you have a small, but significant number of early adopters.

Finally, if you need some help configuring the uNDA workflow in your Ironclad instance, give me a ring and I can show you what we have done.*

*If this were legal advice, I would be sending you a bill.