OneNDA: Difference between revisions

}}{{Quote|''SYNOPSIS: Some cheeky little Hobbits form a fellowship and set out on a perilous adventure to confront the fearsome dragon S[[markup]], a winged beast made entirely out of [[boilerplate]] that jealously guards a huge pile rent treasure. First act goes well.''}}

In Bozo Baggins’ burrow, there was a carefully hand-painted by his uncle Dildo:

{{Maxim|The quotidian is a utility, not an asset}}.

Now, no legal form has more boilerplate than an [[NDA]]. To read one is to behold pure, abstracted, essence of boilerplate. ''[[Boilerplate]] is all there is''. Yet generations of legal eagles have dug themselves into slit trenches to argue the toss over this quotidian contract. It has been some kind of insane compulsion: not one of them ''enjoyed'' it; not one of them saw any point in it; they found themselves compelled to do it; drawn to it like moths to a lamp.  

“I must negotiate this NDA, because this is what I do. [[It is in my nature]].”

Well, readers, against his darkest suspicions, it looks like this OneNDA thing might work! The working group managed to defend against the inevitable [[special pleading]], [[committee]] drafting, the pedantic [[culpa in contrahendo]]-style commentariat to which we agents of the [[Tragedy of the commons|tragic commons]] resort by irrepressible force of habit: through sheer willpower OneNDA generated a nice, simple, pleasant first edition. Not [[Perfection is the enemy of good enough|perfect — nothing is — but absolutely good enough]].  

It’s too early to stand on the poop-deck with a mission accomplished banner, but OneNDA is getting there. So, in a gentle further shove, here some observations about what it could all mean.

A counter-intuitive proposition: ''if you simplify, you may not need technology''. There is no need for automation, document assembly, even a mail merge is probably over-engineering. This is to observe that the conundrum facing modern legal eagles is not one of ''[[service delivery]]'', but ''[[Legal service|service]]'' in the first place. Fix the ''content'', and the delivery challenges fix themselves.  

This leads to a paradox: ''if you simplify properly, it is easier to apply technology''. To design for technology, design for ''no'' technology. The fewer options, subroutines, caveats and [[conditions precedent]] in your legal forms, the easier you will find it to automate them. You will get all kinds of second order benefits too: fewer complaints, fewer comments, less time auditing your monstrous catalogue of templates.

====It’s not the [[form]], or even the content, but the '''consensus''' that matters====

Once upon a time — until 2021 —if you devised your own short-form NDA, however elegant, you could expect it to be ''rejected''<ref>There ''is'' a “battle of the forms”, even if not apparent to the [[doyen of drafting]].</ref> or [[Mark-up|marked up]] to ''oblivion'' by the [[rent-seeking]] massive.<ref>The [[JC]] knows this, because he’s tried it. No [[counterparts]] clause! No waiver of jury trials! It was still worth doing, but it didn’t completely solve the problem.</ref>

Once — okay, ''if'', but here’s hoping — the short-form NDA achieves ''wide-spread community commitment'' the dynamic will be different. Those who built it would use it, sure. But those who ''didn’t'' would look upon it not with suspicion, but with trust: “this is a community standard: I can [[Comfortable|get comfortable]] using it too”. No-one got fired for following the crowd.  

OneNDA is a community effort: interested people came from far and wide to help; everyone<ref>Everyone except [[Ken Adams|the doyen of drafting]] himself, that is: https://www.adamsdrafting.com/onenda-is-mediocrenda-thoughts-on-a-proposed-standard-nondisclosure-agreement/ </ref> checked their agenda at the door. This was what Wikipedians call “[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barn_raising barn-raising]”. The community came together for the greater good of all.

Now once a barn is raised and community feels ownership in it, it is the very ''fact'' of the barn, rather than how it was built or what it is made of, that is its value. Community assets accrue to the benefit of everyone. The structure, day one, might not be perfect — is anything? — but nor is there any interest in undermining it, much less setting fire to the roof: ''it is in everyone’s interest that the barn does the job it was built for''. ''Everyone'' has [[skin in the game]]. The more people use it, the more they are incentivised to make sure it stands. The more people use it, the more [[Perfection is the enemy of good enough|“good enough” ''becomes'' “perfection”]].

Thus, technical complaints that, for example, it refers to “the public domain” and not just “public” — I mean, what a ''[[Knee-slide and jet wings|zinger]]'' — fall away because (if they didn’t already) ''everyone knows what it means''. If there are ten thousand standard NDAs out there that use the expression “public domain”, then no court (and, frankly, no plaintiff) is going to side with a pedant against the weight, and interests, of community consensus.

Once that common standard exists, with the hard lines OneNDA has drawn around itself, there is a further subtle advantage: it will dampen [[rentsmithing|peripheral legal-eaglery]] around small, irritating edge cases (not to mention out-and-out [[pedantry]]).

We all know the common fripperies thrown into negotiation of an NDA by way of a dominance display between legal eagles: [[indemnities]]; [[Exclusive licence|exclusivities]]; [[non-solicitation]]; licencing and so on. Where notices these will quickly be rejected out of hand, the courtship display required to remove them is still [[tedious]] and it takes time.  

But it is hard to rentsmith without a “host” contract. By drawing hard lines around itself, the OneNDA makes itself ''unavailable to act as that host''. It ''frustrates'' the [[rentsmith]]. The party wanting them has to create a new agreement for the purpose, but it is not likely to do that for fear of looking stuipid. ''The standard template discourages peripheral negotiation''.  This is an additional, unintended benefit.

====The knee of the curve====

Creating a simple and standard alternative has a nice effect, too, on the legal complexity curve. It pulls it down and to the right. These are the directions you want it going in. These fancy charts are stimulations of a real-life situation. The problem: a broken contracting process. Our solution: standardise and automate just the simplest, lowest value contract, leaving the process for the rest untouched. The intention was to reduce the workload of the negotation team, giving them more time to focus on the higher value, more difficult contracts.  

The experiment was successful. Ovvernight, half the contract volume was automated. Additional benefits we did not expect were the following:

*Volumes in the automated contract ''doubled overnight'': now it was cheaper, easier to execute, and with guaranteed no errors, the marginal cost went down, so the capacity to execute went up.

*Some “marginal” customers in the adjacent negotiated contract categories elected to move to the free model too: they were happy with the trade off of ”no custom terms” but “contract executed for free and immediately”. Thus the “knee” of the curve deepened and shifted to the right.

*volumes in the higher value negotiated contract categories ''increased'', as the negotiation team had more bandwidth, processed the contracts more quickly and with fewer errors.