Common Paper - Build, negotiate, and sign contracts in minutes

👋 Thanks @ellenchisa, and hello Product Hunt! Jake here, co-founder and CEO of Common Paper. We’re thrilled to be able to share a new approach to legal contracts. Our vision is to turn contracts into APIs. We’ve been working with contracts for our whole careers, and before starting Common Paper, we interviewed more than 100 founders, lawyers, salespeople, and more from companies ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies. We learned a lot about their frustrations with the slow, contentious status quo of contracting and what’s preventing things from being improved. The root cause of the problem is that contracts are unstructured and inconsistent. There are an infinite number of legally valid ways to draft each term in any given contract, and things get even more complicated once people start negotiating. Microsoft Word documents with tracked changes get emailed back and forth, and it creates a big mess of unstructured data. All of this means that it’s really hard for people to actually understand what’s in all of their contracts, and it’s impossible to automate the process of following through on their obligations. An API for contracts changes all of that, and we have built some really exciting elements in service of that vision: ⚖️ Open source, standard contracts: The first two are a Mutual NDA and Cloud Service Agreement (for selling software and cloud services). They are released under a Creative Commons license, so they are free to download and use with no strings attached. 👫 All star committee of attorneys that collaborated on the drafting of the contracts. They have experience in big law firms, in small boutique specialist firms, and as in-house at tech companies. The committee ensures that the standard contracts reflect market norms and industry best practices. 💥 Software for managing and automating the contracts. Our structured contract platform is built from the ground up for standard contracts, and it enables direct access to the data inside them. That means negotiation, closing, and knowing what’s in your contracts is faster and easier than ever before. P.S. The contracts and the platform are all free! You can try them out at www.commonpaper.com

Congrats on the launch @jakestein! This is such a HUGE problem for startups and entrepreneurs everywhere and there's such a huge potential for disruption. Excited to take it for a spin.

@jakestein huge congrats! we all know the last mile is solved with signatures but streamlining the back and forth with an open source, common contract will be a huge win for us all! Perhaps one day we can close enterprise deals at the speed of SaaS.

An incredible realization of an absolutely great idea! Congrats on the launch.

I think there's so much that can be automated in law! and think product looks really useful, well done Common Paper team !

Excited to try this. Much needed!

Super product, and what a spunky song on the promo video!

Congrats on your launch. Great idea!

Definitely interesting, congrats on the launch!

The problem Common Paper is solving is so common for startups, that I'm ecstatic @jakestein and team are innovating in the space. Congrats on the launch!!