Japonas: New role at Law Insider
The lawyer who helped create oneNDA, a standardised non-disclosure agreement, has sold it to the largest public contract and clause database in the world.
Electra Japonas said the acquisition by US-based Law Insider would give oneNDA access to a “global audience”.
Ms Japonas said that while access to oneNDA and its standards would remain free, the move would allow it to add paid-for tools, backed by artificial intelligence (AI).
The initiative was launched in 2021 for use when beginning negotiations over corporate transactions after The Law Boutique (TLB) – of which she was chief executive – realised how much time it spent on NDAs on behalf of clients.
It attracted the support of a host of leading City law firms and in-house counsel. There have been over 4,000 adopters – including top global companies like UBS, American Express and Panasonic – and the documents have been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times.
Through the acquisition, the oneNDA.org standards library, including oneNDA, oneNDA Playbook, oneNDA M&A, and oneDPA (a data processing agreement), and their corresponding translations, will be made available for free to Law Insider’s over three million registered users, and more than 10,000 paying subscribers.
But Ms Japonas said that, to scale it up, she needed access to more data. “The amount of effort required to build standards is huge. Until now we couldn’t quite see a clear route forward, but this will allow us to create more standards and develop more tools to become a more sophisticated, AI-enabled framework.”
The deal will provide the resources to expand the library of contract standards to include master service agreements, statement of work agreements, cloud service agreements, end-user licence agreements, service-level agreements and others.
She said oneNDA would keep its name, for which there was “strong brand loyalty”, and remain free, because charging people would make it “lose its magic”.
As part of the acquisition, Ms Japonas will become chief legal officer of Law Insider while TLB will close.
TLB was an unregulated business supporting in-house lawyers but she said she decided in February to wind it up so she could focus entirely on oneNDA.
She has been working with Preston Clark, president and co-founder of Law Insider and co-founder of SimpleDocs, to develop a tool which automated oneNDA.
“Through the partnership I realised that this was the way to scale oneNDA. Law Insider had all the infrastructure and the data to take oneNDA to the next level.”
Law Insider said it had “immediate plans” to build on the success of oneNDA through the launch of Law Insider Standards in December.
This would be “an expansive contract standards and playbook library that, offered for free and including the oneNDA standards and playbooks”.
Mr Clark commented: “For over a decade, our vision for Law Insider has been very simple. We want to be the leading global database for contract templates and clauses.
“With the recent popularisation of contract standards, and the rapid emergence of AI-enabled drafting tools, it’s critical for Law Insider to adapt our vision to include these new methods for building contracts.
“Electra and what she’s built with oneNDA are a perfect complement to this next chapter for Law Insider.”
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