Drafting and reviewing Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) is often one of the most inefficient tasks for legal teams. Your team likely creates numerous NDAs for various scenarios, including projects, procurement, and investments.
While these agreements all follow a similar format, they often require expertise to tailor them to the specific context. This means you must source the relevant context from the contract requestor to prepare the draft. Once the draft comes back, you’ll then have to review changes, make amendments, and negotiate clauses to ensure nothing’s amiss.
All of this takes up precious time if you do it manually.
Imagine eliminating these inefficiencies. With an automated contract management approach, you can speed up your processes and push contracts over the line — ahead of time. Let's see how NDA automation can achieve this.
Your legal team requires context before creating an NDA. Unfortunately, the context given at the beginning of the process is often insufficient or non-existent. This means your legal team must spend hours of their time fact-finding to understand what the NDA is for, who it’s with, whether they’re listed on an exchange, and more. This results in reduced productivity and prolonged NDA drafting.
With the right platform, you can automate this requirement with bespoke questionnaire forms. These forms can range from simple to more complex with configurable input and conditional logic. From there, your teams can deliver the required information quickly without the need for endless emails or meetings.
As we mentioned earlier, your NDAs will often follow a similar structure — it’s the context that varies. If your team must generate a contract from scratch every time, this can be frustrating and repetitive.
A contract management tool will provide a library of standard and open-source NDA templates for you to choose from, as well as the ability to upload your own. You can then customize these templates, with or without the help of a vendor, to ensure they follow your specific requirements.
his reduces the workload involved in NDA drafting. Your sales team can trigger the contract generation process autonomously — without involving your legal team early on. This frees up time for more critical tasks.
Reviewing contract changes and negotiating terms requires a careful eye. While automated tools and AI can’t completely take this task away from your legal teams, they can make it five times faster.
With the right platform, you can:
This speeds up the review and editing process without compromising accuracy. Additionally, these platforms often integrate with existing processes and software." Most have built-in plugins for Microsoft Word, DocuSign, and Adobe Acrobat Sign, allowing you to make changes without needing to learn the ropes of a new platform.
Relying on a team member to forward a contract (and any subsequent amendments) can be inefficient. Depending on the individual’s workload, it may happen within the hour or the next day. You may even risk missing some essential steps over the weekend.
By building workflows with automatic triggers, you can send contracts to all relevant parties via email in real-time. This keeps everyone on the same page and instils confidence in your NDA process.
Having discussed NDA automation benefits, let's illustrate with a real-world example. At Pactly, we worked with Virtuos Games to automate their confidentiality agreement process using the strategies above. Prior to this automation, their process was long and arduous. It often took upwards of a couple of days to fully execute a contract.
“It would be late in the evening, and my sales team would ask me a bunch of questions — where to find contract templates, what to change, who should sign it.” - Senior Legal Counsel Johnathan Yong, Virtuos Games.
Since using Pactly, Virtuos are able to finalize their confidentiality agreements with an external party in two hours. Better still, the median time to receive a signed, legally binding contract is now only 12 hours.
Through NDA automation, Virtuos can avoid tiresome bottlenecks, speed up the contract review process, and give their legal team more breathing room during the working days.
If you'd like to see our NDA intake form in action, follow this link to experience how your sales reps can effortlessly fill out a form on our platform and instantly receive a fully customized NDA