Robert Ambrogi Blog
Law Insider, a company that provides what it says is the world’s largest public contracts database, has acquired oneNDA, developer of an open source contract standard for non-disclosure agreements that has been downloaded by thousands of organizations throughout the world.
Through the acquisition, the oneNDA.org standards library — which includes oneNDA, oneNDA Playbook, oneNDA M&A, and oneDPA, and their corresponding translations — will be made available for free to Law Insider’s over 3 million registered users, and more than 10,000 paying subscribers.
In December, further building on the acquisition, Law Insider will launch Law Insider Standards, which it says will be an expansive contract standards and playbook library that will be offered for free to its users, and that will include the oneNDA standards and playbooks.
Electra Japonas, the cofounder of oneNDA, will join Law Insider as its first chief legal officer.
“oneNDA has been around for three years now, and it is time to evolve if we really want to realize the vision that we set out to achieve,” Japonas told me during a recent interview with her and Preston Clark, president and cofounder of Law Insider. “And that’s to become the go-to standard, it’s to create a world whereby you’re not constantly having this battle of the forms over documents that hardly get litigated, and where a bunch of lawyers are spending a bunch of time on stuff that doesn’t really matter so much. So coming up with a standard is a way to really transform the way that lawyers work.”
For Clark, the acquisition is a major step towards realizing his vision of making Law Insider the leading global database for contract templates and clauses, he told me.
“With the recent popularization of contract standards, and the rapid emergence of AI-enabled drafting tools, it’s critical for Law Insider to adapt our vision to include these new methods for building contracts. Electra and what she’s built with oneNDA are a perfect complement to this next chapter for Law Insider.”
oneNDA had previously partnered with Law Insider’s sibling company, SimpleDocs, also led by Clark, to develop AutoNDA, a free software platform to automate the creation and management of NDAs under the oneNDA standard.
Related product demo: How It Works: AutoNDA, A Free Platform to Automate NDAs Under the Open Source oneNDA Standard.
Expanding on that development, and to promote the adoption of oneNDA and Law Insider Standards, Law Insider will offer an automated version of all of its standard contracts that will enable adopters to create, send and electronically sign the standards for free, all powered by SimpleDocs.
Additionally, all standard playbooks will be available for free through SimpleDocs’ AI-powered Word add-in and will provide instant redlining suggestions and comments.
Both Japonas and Clark see opportunities to greatly expand the library of contract standards to cover different use cases and industries. When Law Insider Standards launches in December, users will still be able to search for public contracts and clauses, but their results will also include curated standard versions developed and verified by the Law Insider/oneNDA community.
“This is an incredibly exciting next chapter for oneNDA,” said the London-based Japonas. “By joining forces with Law Insider, we enable our existing contract standards to reach a much larger global audience, while also giving ourselves the resources to expand the library of contract standards to include MSAs, SOWs, cloud service agreements, EULAs, SLAs – among many others.”
Law Insider currently provides both free and paid access to its contracts database. When it launches Law Insider Standards, access to the standards will remain free, but the company may add special libraries and resources at a premium cost.
“We want network effects with standards,” Clark said. “The only way we reach the critical mass of adoption is if it’s just freely available to everyone, and that we don’t create impediments or blockers that prevent the adoption of the standard. Standards will always be free.”