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Common Paper

Standard agreements and contract platform for faster B2B deals

4.4Free; paid plansBest for Portfolio companies speeding up sales contracts; funds standardizing NDAs
Standard Agreements Contracts Open Source

Overview

Common Paper publishes free, open-source standard agreements — mutual NDAs, Cloud Service Agreements, DPAs, design partner and pilot agreements — drafted with input from a large committee of technology lawyers, plus a platform for sending, negotiating, and signing them. VCs recommend it to portfolio companies to compress sales-contracting cycles, and use its standard NDAs in their own deal flow.

Key features

  • Open-source standard agreements (NDA, CSA, DPA, pilot, design partner)
  • Structured cover-page format separating business terms from legal boilerplate
  • Send, negotiate, and e-sign contracts on platform
  • Contract tracking and repository
  • Standards maintained with a committee of technology lawyers

Pros

  • Standardization genuinely shortens negotiation cycles
  • Free templates are high quality and widely accepted
  • Cover-page structure makes terms legible to non-lawyers

Cons

  • Standards are strongest for B2B SaaS contracting, narrower elsewhere
  • Counterparties unfamiliar with the format sometimes redline from scratch anyway

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