Automated sales order processing in NDAs

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[Music] all right good morning good afternoon hello everybody oh this is great I see a lot of people filing in good morning good afternoon we have a global audience here today so wherever you're joining us from good day I'll say good day to you or or good night I don't know uh but anyway great to see you joining us we're excited to get going with today's webinar um I'm going to give it about 45 seconds for everybody to file in and get comfortable and then we will kick off uh with our content today friends [Music] all right good morning good afternoon for those of you that have just joined us we're going to wait another 30 seconds or so and then we will get kicked off with today's event I can't we love to see the an active chat so uh in so much as you're comfortable um we'd love to know where you're joining us from today if you want to drop that in the chat I will start I am in Dallas Texas if you're comfortable letting us know drop it in the chat for us we've got Warsaw Poland in the Q a [Music] London you oh chat is disabled thank you that is a Miss on my part let me go in and change this true we couldn't believe what I've become [Music] all right chat should be enabled now but we've got Cancun Mexico Denver Colorado Brazil turkey Jamaica this is awesome I love seeing this Colorado Springs we're going to Colorado Springs here in a couple of weeks Richmond Virginia Dominican Republic awesome awesome well thank you uh so much again welcome from wherever you are joining us it is great to see you great to have you with us my name is Josh McCullough with law Insider um I am going to be extremely brief here so standard webinar stuff um Elektra are you still seeing my screen just want to confirm yes okay great um again my name is Josh McCullough with law Insider we have a great webinar today with a lot of content some basic kind of webinar 101 again it looks like the chat is up and going thank you for whoever let me know we got that fixed feel free to engage with us we'd love to chat with you in the chat um and then the Q a we have so much content today I don't know if we're going to have time for Q a but if you have questions feel free to put them there um and if there's time we will get to them uh with that we have special guest today and uh without further Ado I'm going to go ahead and hand it over to Elektra yabona who is going to talk us through today's content on how to standardize and automate your NDA and give us a little bit of the backstory the history of one NDA which is a really exciting open source solution to ndas so with that Electra welcome good afternoon thank you for being here and take it away thank you Josh thank you for having me and it's an honor to be here and to be speaking to so many of you today thank you all for dialing in okay so before I start talking about how to optimize your mdas I will start off by talking a little bit about me I started off life in sight press which is a small island in the Mediterranean if you haven't heard of it and that's where I grew up until I was 18 and then I moved to England to do my degree in law and then I moved on to a masters International Business Law because you basically couldn't study law in Cyprus when I was growing up there I think things have changed since then and when I finish my degree I went straight into the space industry so that's where I started off my career I worked at the European Space Agency which is like NASA but less well-known and then from there I moved through Europe I lived in Germany for a while and then I came back to the UK I lived in the Netherlands and I worked in various organizations all in my capacity as a lawyer but I always had a strong focus on contracts so I was always in the in-house legal team but I was more focused on the way that they contracted and Commercial contracts more broadly so after 10 years in in various roles I quite frankly became quite disillusioned by how the whole contract function worked um in an in-house environment and specifically I felt that there were a lot of opportunities that were being missed uh with with the contract space and that's because in my eyes contracts are there to build relationships between people they're there to facilitate healthy boundaries relationships and they double up as a backstop in case the relationship's hours but that's a secondary function and I I believe that as people who create contracts we seem to have our end users mixed up quite often and that's not conducive to the best results when it comes to building out effective contract functions so when I was in my last role um at bat um I I decided that enough was enough and I wanted to start a business that really focused on creating Better Contracting functions and that's when I founded tlb a company that focuses on streamlining the end-to-end contract function through um design and operations so we're we're a legal company but we have a very strong focus on legal design and legal operations and together we combine that expertise to build that really effective contract functions um and the the aim is that by doing this we enable in house law is to get their time back so they can focus on more strategic work work that you studied law to do but also to leverage leverage your contract functions so that it adds true strategic value to your business so trb exists because we understand the in-house function and the problems they face and those at predominantly threefold the way we see it so firstly you want to focus on important strategic work but you don't have time because you're inundated with often low value um high volume work you want to bring more efficiency to the way that you operate but often you lack the time the headspace and the expertise to bring in that operational element into the way that you build out your function and finally you want to build great relationships with other people in your business but sometimes it's difficult because your position in the business is such that you are perceived as a bottleneck or you don't you know you're not making things move quickly enough and that's not because you're a lawyer it's because the process that underpins Contracting isn't always as effective as it could be so what we do at tlb is quite unique because we combine the three necessary elements to enable the creation of a really streamlined slick contract function we're legal experts on the one hand but we're also illegal Ops focused and legal design LED so on the one hand we pick up the heavy lifting we take away all the Overflow that really busy in-house legal teams have but in parallel we help you streamline the way that you operate through operations um design and technology and the idea is that while we work with you we also continuously improve the way the function that the contract functions operate through delivering constant improvements like playbooks template redesigns and simplified processes and you take a design-led user-centric approach to everything we do to make sure the end users and internal stakeholders are engaged because that's something that lawyers don't always do when they're offering a service so the business has been going for about five and a half years now and we've been growing steadily but back in 2020 when the pandemic hit we were only three years old at the business all of a sudden quadrupled and that was because of the pandemic it wasn't good for everybody but for legal businesses it actually was quite beneficial um and the reason for that was because they were hiring freezes but legal teams were inundated with really important strategic work and they didn't want to be bogged down with low value high volume contracts also they weren't able to hire so where those contracts were increasing in some Industries we saw grew massively like the finance industry did grow during the pandemic they just needed more hands on deck so they brought tlb in and we work tirelessly to grow our team and deliver our services to our clients so at the end of the year when we were all absolutely exhausted and confused about the world that we were now living in um we decided to do a deep dive and take stock to understand what we'd done over the course of the year and what we found was quite staggering we found out that 63 of the agreements we'd reviewed over the course of the year were mdas but that only accounted to seven percent of our Revenue which is an astonishing statistic and it just demonstrates how little value these agreements deliver not just to the businesses but also to the companies that um that rely on these agreements or you know use these agreements to generate Revenue it's not beneficial for everybody and we had to admit it to ourselves we set up this business to help teams streamline the way they operated and bring the design Ops focused lens to the way that they worked but with the service that we were offering in reviewing ndas we were actually part of the problem we weren't part of the solution we were perpetuating a broken system and um we didn't like that stat and we decided that we needed to do something to change it but um before I go into into that action that we took I just want to delve into the problem in a bit more detail so what is the problem with ndas and why do they cause so much headache so the problem is that ndas are indeed broken um everyone has their own template of an NDA and unfortunately they are all quite boring because they all say more or less the same thing but in different language um the reality is that ndas are incredibly low risk but they're also very high volume every commercial conversation you enter into will nowadays require an NDA I visited a client's office the other day and I had to sign an NDA to get into the office you know ndas are now just used um so so perpetually they're everywhere so they create huge volumes of work but actually there's very little to zero Roi for the amount of time effort cost and pain that they cause and the impact of this NDA problem is also it is very real and it has real life implications on businesses today because they slow down commercial dealings often with ndas causing huge friction in what could be a simple trans straightforward transaction you know if you want to enter into a conversation with someone you may not even be exchanging confidential information but company policies are such that you're required to enter into a contractual relationship with the other side before you begin those conversations that can damage relationships I've been in scenarios myself where deals were killed or relationships irreparably damaged due to nasty NDA negotiations and they add little to no value because once the main agreement is signed the NDA naturally Falls away and replaced by the confidentiality Provisions in that main Services agreement that you do end up signing or whatever it isn't you're signing with them or if the parties don't go further and enter into any other agreement the NDA becomes irrelevant and obviously really soon after you've just spent time negotiating it and of course they're there to protect confidential information but it's very rare that they will be relied on in the future to pursue a claim and finally you know the reality is as I said earlier they're very boring to review and in a world where quite quitting is quite trendy and it's really difficult to retain staff do you want large forces of Highly Educated qualified people reviewing these agreements that are all quite saving so ndas are broken and what's more less than one in one percent of ndas ever get litigated and often if they are litigated they're litigated as part of a bigger litigation say for example in an m a scenario where where confidential information has been breached that's where nda's um uh will get litigated and this statistic came from when we were doing what NDA which I'll be talking about in a minute the law firms that worked with us did a review of their own cases these were Global law firms and this is a statistic that's come from them so this is not just some ad hoc research um just to give some credibility to that statistic where okay so um what's the solution to this and how can can there even be a solution to this huge problem that is ndas um so is standardization uh something that we can leverage for a solution to this issue what if we all agreed to adopt the same standard NDA template how much time cost and headache would we all save and that sounds like an ambitious um and ambitious kind of objective so how would anyone even go about doing that okay so the first thing you'd need to do to create an NDA standard is to um get buy-in from the outset and from the right people that are going to influence more people and give them fomo fear of missing out so that they can get involved too this is a really important step get get people on board that are going to get other people interested and low-key jealous about what they're doing so that they can get involved too you need hype you also want to build a really strong community of like-minded forward-thinking lawyers and contract professionals that see the value of a common NDA standard and they're not deterred by the need for Perfection every single time because as lawyers that's something that is holding us back and is probably one of the reasons that we're one of the last Industries to truly innovate and take leaps when it comes to the way that we work because lawyers do seek Perfection and often you know we don't apply the 80 20 rule which is problematic because we're trained to think that way but you know when you're trying to innovate you really can't go by the by the 100 Perfection rule because that will hold you back so if you can get lawyers involved that that agree with that approach um and uh leverage that expertise to create a really amazing killer template that's open source looks good and is easy to understand and free to use then you can go ahead and create a really amazing product especially if you have the attitude to listen to your users and then iterate and that's exactly what we did so in March 2021 um after we've done this deep dive into all the contracts we've reviewed and found out the disgusting statistic of 63 of when you equal seven percent Revenue I put out this thought um on LinkedIn and I basically said what if we all just agreed to adopt one India standard how much time and money would be would we save and that post alone went viral and so one NDA came to exist and I will tell you the story of how that happened now so one NDA is a crowd-sourced legal community-led open source initiative to standardize the dreaded non-disclosure agreement and with input from some of the brightest legal Minds in the industry and feedback from a wider community of 1 200 lawyers we created an NDA standard that's fair balanced and written in plain English and it's also free to use so if you want to adopt one NDA today it's free there's no cost to it so you can go ahead and do that and the reason we did that is because we realized that we you know we wanted to be part of the broader solution and actually working with individual teams on a case-by-case basis was great but at an industry level there was a problem and we wanted to tackle it so that's what we did um so his hat went after I posted on LinkedIn I had literally tens of messages pouring in from all of the world all over the world from people saying that the one NDA concept was a great idea and that if I went ahead they would support me and so I decided to put it to the test so I went ahead and I created a Squarespace website over a weekend and then in a follow-up LinkedIn post I put it out there that if we could get 100 people to sign up over the course of two weeks we would spearhead the initiative to standardize the NDA and we hit that number 12 hours from launch by the end of the two-week period we had 330 sign ups including from lawyers that worked in some of the world's largest organizations I've put some of the logos up here so that you can get an understanding of the magnitude of this initiative and how far it reached um and from those people we picked out a steering committee and their role was to drive the creation of the template and also be one and day ambassadors to help spread the word and create the fomo that I mentioned earlier so um the process that we followed with one NDA was really methodical and very well thought out so initially what we did is we took an NDA that was created by the world Commerce and contract team and the WCC is a non-profit organization and its objective is to improve the way that people contract on the basis that the whole world the whole business World hangs together through a net of contracts and there is definitely a better way of doing them so what the WCC helpfully did is take 2000 ndas that they'd amassed from the people that were members of their community and they put them through an AI tour and the AI tool spat out a non-disclosure agreement that was five pages long and but it was a very comprehensive and it included all the potential Provisions that one might find in an NDA so what we did is we took that NDA and we broke it down into functions what we wanted to do is decouple the drafting part from the functional part of a contract because what we do as lawyers when we're reviewing a contract is two things we do two things with our brain at the same time and that can create quite a mental load on the one hand we're reviewing the provision to see whether we agree with the premise you know should should you have a penalty clause in an NDA probably not and then on the other hand we're looking at the drafting to see whether we agree with the way that that provision or that function is being expressed from a language perspective so what we want to do is separate these two things to alleviate the load and get people to really assess whether certain functions needed to be in the NDA without getting bogged down um with style and ways of using a language um so we we did that and together with the steering committee we decided what goes in and what stays out so the original NDA was reduced by about 60 with only 40 of the position Provisions making the cut and I must stress here that this NDA is not meant for every single instance in which you need an MDA this NDA is created for 80 of the instances in which you need a commercial box standard NDA we're not talking about Coca-Cola showing their secret recipe to someone we're not we're not talking about you exposing your source code we're talking about bug standard ndas that will make up that will effectively um be suitable for most instances in which you need one so with that in mind with that scope in mind the stairco went ahead and was quite Savage actually it cut it down by over half and then fought the prison Provisions made the cut and what we did is we then handed these high-level descriptions of those functions to the law firms who are part of the steering committee we had some amazing Law Firm names um and we handed it over to them and we said to them guys please go away and draft the language that you think needs to underpin these provisions and then please send those back to us anonymously and what we're going to do is give them to the in-house lawyers in the stereo committee and without knowing who drafted them they won't be biased by your name they will choose the best language that they think um really expresses the provision in the most simple language now another thing that I haven't mentioned is that as part of this initiative we were also constantly talking to this community that we built and we found out that 75 of that Community said that they wanted their ndas to be as much self-serve as possible they didn't want their expensive lawyers dealing with ndas they wanted the business to be able to self-serve to the extent possible so it was really important that when we were creating one NDA it was drafted in a way so that people that weren't lawyers that didn't have a legal background could pick it up and easily work with it so this is a really important instruction that we gave to the law firms so the law firms came back they loved this little competition that we put them through and the in-house lawyers voted on their favorite language and then that became one NDA version zero but we realized that the steering committee that was only made up of 60 lawyers which is quite a big crowd it wasn't big enough to really represent all the sectors that we wanted to represent so what we did is we took version zero and we put it back out to our community and we solicited feedback from 1 200 lawyers that was the level that had amassed by this time of the project so we started to get information to get their feedback people were commenting and we had a really engaged conversation it's super interesting to see how if you take lawyers out of an adversarial environment and ask them to create how creative they truly can be and how collaborative they can work together it was astonishing and a true highlight in my career and so um the one NDA Community went ahead provided the comments we then took that commentary put it into the document and then we issued it again as version one so we put um version one out into the public in August 2021 and the response was phenomenal so from week one we had over 2 000 downloads and today um we have many more than that um and uh this is just a sneak peek in terms of what it looks like feel free to go and have a look at one NDA and you can download a version yourself but this is what it looks like it looks sleek it's clean it's written in plain English and it's easy for people to understand and importantly it's short because no one wants a 10-page MDA it's um it's a it's a nightmare when you receive those so we made sure that it was designed with the user in mind and as I said the response has been phenomenal phenomenal we've had over 30 000 downloads today we have 1 000 adopter organizations these are organizations that have formally said we adopt one NDA as our organizational standard that doesn't mean you can't use another standard or another document or another template you absolutely can but it just says we use one NDA we use one NDA and we will accept one NDA if it's sent to us obviously if the conditions are correct and these are some of our very early adopters so UBS Panasonic tiagio and PWC UK all adopted 1mda um really soon after we launched it and in March 2022 we iterated on one NDA based on the feedback that we received and we have issued it as version two and since then adoptions have gone up even more and we've now exceeded 1 000 over 66 countries but we need your help and this is why I'm here today um our objective is to make one NDA the most widely used NDA template globally with a view to save companies time reduce costs and save relationships and to really provide value when it comes to your contract function and not to mention lawyer's sanity because I don't think many of us studied law to spend such a chunk of our careers um reviewing these types of documents so what we need from you to get there is your feedback and as with any good product user feedback is key so we invite feedback from all our users on our website um you don't need to necessarily have used it you can read it you can have feedback you can tell us if it works in order jurisdiction or otherwise um and any commentary is really helpful and very welcomed so what does the future hold for one NDA so as I said um we are looking to build on this so what we'd like to do is update the versions based on real user feedback we won't be doing any immediate updates because we released a new version in March 2020 um two so what we want to make sure is that people have enough time to embed that version into their processes particularly with large organizations it's quite difficult to make a change like this it is a change management piece it's easier for smaller organizations but for the larger ones we don't want to alienate them by constantly issuing new versions even though the newer version might be improved so we won't be issuing another um one India version for at least 18 months however we would like to collate as much feedback as possible because these things do take time and 18 months actually isn't very long when it comes to creating these updates so please head over to our website download one NDA have a look and let us know if you think it works for you you and if you have any comments the other thing we're working on at the moment is translations so we already have four translations that have been done so very hopefully members of our community particularly again in large organizations um or really fast growth scale-ups have offered to translate the document for us and Link letters um the law firm that we've partnered with from the outset on this has kindly agreed um without you know pro bono to review these translations and make sure that they are verified translations and that they do correlate to one NDA but also that they're localized so if you have a Portuguese a Portuguese one NDA for Brazil we want to make sure that there are no nuances in the law that need to be taken into consideration that weren't during one idea creation so that translation piece is happening right now and stay tuned we will be um we will be releasing more information about those translations and when they'll be available to you and finally we have already done our second project which is one DPA one DPA will be updated very soon because there's new legislation in the making and one DPA is a standard data protection addendum and what we want to do is build on this initiative and the methodology that we've developed and try to make it a slick um as possible so we want to be able to create more of these standards and um share them with the rest of the community because we think that it really can add value um remember that 188 is the most expensive NDA that's ever been drafted and it's free so please go ahead and take advantage of it um okay so that's that's it from me as Josh said earlier please do feel free to add any questions that you may have into the Q a button below and we'll get to them and uh thank you for listening if you'd like to find find out head over to our site or uh link with me on LinkedIn and direct message me I'm always available and yeah I'm now going to head hand over to Josh who has a couple of reminders for you yeah thank you Electra um such a cool story uh just that's an exciting story that's quite a journey to to get where 1da uh NDA has come um let me see I'm looking through the chat and um there were a few things so first of all a lot of you asking where can you access so on the screen now there is the uh URL uh .onea.org uh is that right Electra if anybody wants to take a next step that's where they should go okay um before I uh wrap up with a couple reminders about law Insider um first of all hi Gary you're right in my backyard good to good to hear hear from you in the chat um wow a lot of questions coming in and it's uh difficult to make sense of them all um this quick so maybe we can look at a follow-up we'll we'll do our best to to in some way shape or form connect with you there is one interesting one here I was curious um have you benchmarked one in D.A against um what some of the AI models the learn language models are spitting out in terms of AI any comments or feedback on that and the benefit of one NDA is that it's a standard and it's common throughout so I think that the downside of using AI or or generative or whatever you're using to build out your to create your NDA templates is that they will be different the idea is that you have an NDA and the other side also has the same NDA so that battle of the forms that the outset goes away because now what you do is you say I want to enter into a conversation with you I'm going to send you my NDA the other side says no I want to send you my NDA so that all falls away and I think that's really the benefit of one NDA we're not claiming that this is the most perfect NDA ever written perfect contracts don't exist what we're saying is that it's good enough enough lawyers have said that it's good enough and it works for 80 of the instances what we have done is created something that we're calling a graveyard document which again is on our website and what the graveyard document does is it pulls out Provisions that you might expect to see in an NDA and tells you why they're not there so if you're trying to push this out with it push this out within your organization and people are saying where's that Clause that I'm always used to seeing you've got an answer that demonstrates that we're not being flippant about it we considered it but we deliberately decided to exclude it yeah super interesting just the the impact of all the AI stuff going on with uh with everything um okay several folks um have asked about the slides uh we will send out the slides we'll email them give us a couple days watch your inbox they'll come from law Insider um with that I wanted to do a couple of reminders for this is uh our law Insider Community today's event's been brought to you presented by law Insider um for those of you that uh are in the law Insider database uh sorting searching through contracts doing your research looking at it at all the the content out there um we do have trainings coming up uh in fact we have one group training tomorrow these are uh the feedback we get on these are really cool usually it's a group of 20 25 30 folks um they're small enough uh that there's interaction you can ask questions Molly able is our Solutions expert who will walk you through all the new features and walk you through some um some cases on how to use the different features to get more more impact from the law Insider tool if you would like to register for that webinar tomorrow tomorrow I am putting that link in the chat right now it is a zoom registration link another reminder if at any point sometimes folks have very specific questions or want a more Deep dive one-on-one training session with Molly she's phenomenal at that she is excited to meet you and talk to you and and walk you through the solution you can book individual one-on-one time with Molly as well I'm gonna put that that is a calendly scheduling link I am putting that in the chat so I just put two chat links in here one is if you want to attend the group training tomorrow the others if you wanted to schedule one-on-one time with Molly able uh if you haven't met Molly she knows the solutions like the back of her hand she's phenomenal at helping you get the most from the solution so um with that those are the reminders I just wanted to make sure you were aware of uh Elektra thank you so much uh for uh for being with us today super interesting I'm a bit on my own journey of learning on some of this stuff um and so that was super informative really appreciate it thank you to everybody that joined us we had a great crowd here today uh thank you we look forward to seeing you on the next event hope to see you tomorrow in the training and for everybody have a phenomenal day wherever you are and we'll see you next time thank you thanks