Non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) are one of the most common business contracts. Most companies deal with hundreds, if not thousands of them each year. Businesses have to sign NDAs with prospects, clients, suppliers, employees… it quickly adds up. Due to these high volumes, non-disclosure agreements can quickly become a source of risk for your business, as they are rarely created, processed, or stored the right way.
NDAs are crucial to protect your business, your valuable information, employee data, and intellectual property. But to do that they need to be properly drafted, signed, and enforceable. If your business has to deal with high volumes of NDAs without a proper NDA management process in place, your company is facing important compliance and legal risks:
- An NDA could easily fall through the cracks and be signed without prior review by your legal team.
- Even when an NDA is appropriately reviewed and signed, there is a chance it will not be properly stored and you won’t be able to locate it when you actually need it a couple of years down the road.
Beyond the above legal risks, a poorly managed NDA process can also directly affect your revenues through the increased duration of your sale cycle and by creating unnecessary ill-will with prospects right from the start.
There are some process improvements you can put in place to avoid these legal risks and lost revenues:
- Centralize your storage of NDAs.
- Provide sales with non-negotiable templates.
- Educate the sales team on the importance of NDAs and the need for prior legal review.
- Have one person on your legal team who will own NDAs.
The above may be common sense but it’s actually challenging to implement as it can be hard to get people to comply. One way to make sure everyone does comply with the NDA management process you put in place is to invest in a Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) solution to fully automate the management of your NDAs from creation, review, and approval to signature and storage.
If you want to allow your business users to speedily and autonomously generate NDAs while protecting your business from legal risks by ensuring systematic and timely legal review of all NDAs before signature, as well as appropriate centralized storage of NDAs, AODocs CLM is the solution for you!
And beyond NDAs, a Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) solution can be a key asset for your business. Check our earlier blog post on “Why Should You Automate Your Contract Management Process” which details the key benefits of a CLM Solution.
