This sounds very interesting. Your website doesn't appear to be loading. (edit: It's now back up - thanks!)
However, the idea of standard, programmable contracts is awesome!
One question: In your example of being forced to use Oracle's paperwork - it's not clear how CommonPaper would solve that - wouldn't you still have been forced to use Oracle's contract?
Shoot, thanks for flagging the website. I think we have it working now but trying to make sure it stays up.
For the Oracle example, big, old-school companies like this are definitely the hardest to get onboard. However, there are examples of large enterprises adopting standard contracts, including:
We've already seen examples of Fortune 500 companies signing Common Paper agreements, and we're hopeful that it will become more and more accepted by them over time
When you say Fortune 500 companies have signed your agreements, are these material agreements, or NDAs and small-dollar contracts? Or are they signing six- and seven-figure deals on your paper?
Some of them are six-figure deals. I don't personally know about any seven-figure deals, but we only find out about a minority of the use of the agreements.
The NDA is definitely the highest volume agreement, however. And a lot more of the deals are for 10k than $300k.
How much can you "see" of the contracts being signed? Is it a "we just promise not to look, much" or are they encrypted such that you need customer permission to view?
We would not need a customer's key in order to access a contract. However, only certain members of our team have the ability to access contracts, and they only do that when needed for support or to fix a bug. We log all instances of accessing a customer's account.
Stats like those I shared above are from a combination of what users tell us and from aggregated, anonymized metrics across our app.
Agreed…feels like this is as much a cultural problem as a tech one. Meaning, from my experience at large companies, I feel like those lawyers get off on the fight of who gets to write the terms
Culture is definitely part of the problem, and I completely agree that tech alone can't solve it. I also think it's critical to change the incentives that lawyers are responding to.
I've spoken with lots of lawyers in procurement at large companies. They're typically perceived as a cost center, and they often have to deal with lots of people from the rest of the business complaining that the contracts need to be reviewed/approved faster.
If they are processing thousands of vendor contracts per year, think about how much faster they can be if most/all of those contracts are on their in-house template, rather than a different template for each vendor.
But if lots of their vendors are using a standard contract, then there isn't the same cost in terms of time for using it.
All that said, this is going to be hard, and we're not expecting everyone to change overnight. We have, however, been encouraged to see examples of large companies signing the standard contracts, and we're grateful to have attorneys from big companies like Thompson Reuters and Salesforce on our committee.
If company A manages to convince Oracle to use CommonPaper's agreement, it clears the way for startup B to use the same agreement, without spending months on lawyers!
That's right, and the other thing I forgot to mention is that we're seeing evidence that it becomes easier for company A as well.
If both sides are arguing for their own custom template, then it's basically an arm wrestling match and whoever has the most leverage wins. If one side instead says "We adopted this independent standard created by attorneys from a bunch of companies" they get more leverage while being less adversarial.
Our early users saw a significant increase in the percentage of deals on their own paper (which is/was the standard) before they could be getting any benefit from the customer having seen the agreement before.
However, the idea of standard, programmable contracts is awesome!
One question: In your example of being forced to use Oracle's paperwork - it's not clear how CommonPaper would solve that - wouldn't you still have been forced to use Oracle's contract?