NDAs & Contracting

Routine legal tasks are the bane of in-house legal departments: high volumes which disrupt higher value/complex workloads and which are not cost-effective to outsource to traditional law firms.

We’re a core team of experienced litigators, providing “law firm quality” eDisclosure, document review and litigation support services to firms and in-house teams.

We bridge the IT/legal divide, to ensure that nothing is lost in translation as is so often the case on these matters.

As experienced litigators, we ensure that our services are accurate and delivered to agreed deadlines and budgets. We also know how to make the experience as frictionless as possible for the instructing lawyers, and how to provide valuable insights to help with review performance and factual understanding.

Law firms who work with us, tend to instruct us again and again.

Confidentiality Agreement

NDAs

The humble NDA or confidentiality agreement is the overture to a new commercial relationship. As such, there’s usually pressure from the lawyer’s own business client to limit changes – to avoid annoying the counterparty and to get the NDA signed and allow the underlying exchange of information to occur.

NDAs need to be carefully reviewed to ensure they are fit for purpose and within policy (e.g. on terms such as non-solicitation, non-circumvent, IPR), but the mark-up should be pragmatic and commercially-minded, to keep changes to a minimum.

We’ll study our clients’ NDA playbook or work with them to create one, and perform a number of practice reviews until the service is ready to go live. The playbook will determine red lines, opening and negotiating positions and escalation procedures where required. The result is a set of rules which our experienced legal freelancers will apply consistently across all future documents.

For clients who receive NDAs, we offer a fixed-fee per NDA inclusive of the initial review and mark-up and all communications, negotiations and interim drafts until an agreed version for signing. Our fees are set by reference to the complexity of the playbook rules and the size of the NDA (based on word count) and start at £225 (plus VAT) for an average length NDA with one business day turnaround.

Contract Review and Negotiation

Any business which regularly enters into the same kind of contract – for example the sale or procurement of professional services – will have a set of acceptable contracting positions and red lines, whether or not they are formally documented. These rules will form the basis of a playbook which we can help develop.

We will agree a fixed price per contract review based on the complexity of the playbook, contract length, required turn-around times and the extent of work required (from tailoring a precedent document to reviewing a counterparty document and negotiating it to an agreed draft).

We provide our services using a team of experienced legal freelancers who have been famliarised with a customer’s specific contract playbook, managed by an experienced project manager using secure collaboration technology and processes.