Legal community come together to create an open-source standardised NDA

After a successful initiative launch, oneNDA is ready for adoption, as the legal community come together to create an open-source standardised NDA.

In March 2021 a group of in-house and private practice lawyers came together to create a universally standardised and agreed upon Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA), now widely known in the legal community as ‘oneNDA’.

Led by the CEO and COO of tlb, Electra Japonas and Roisin Noonan, the oneNDA initiative aimed to improve the efficiency of Legal teams, while increasing transparency, speeding up business processes and saving the business money. Since its launch, over 1000 people have signed up to be a part of the oneNDA initiative.

Getting the legal community to agree to the text of one single NDA was an ambitious target, so to make sure it succeeded they called on a subset of the oneNDA community to help craft oneNDA and steer the project.

The oneNDA Community included:

Steering Committee – A group of top in-house counsel from some of the largest and most innovative companies in the world, including Airbus, Adidas, Barclays, Coca-Cola, Deliveroo and UBS as well as representatives from globally recognised law firms – including Allen & Overy, Ashurst, Gilbert + Tobin, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Linklaters and Slaughter & May.
Research Group – Research Partners to provide insights into standardisation, litigation and points of contention in NDAs, including CMS and Hogan Lovells.
Founding Club – c.100 early adopter organisations passionate about standardisation in the legal industry, who acted as a sounding board to make sure the initiative was moving in the right direction.
oneNDA Club – Everyone that joined after 1 March 2021, who provided a vital role by helping to collate community thoughts and feedback throughout each stage of the oneNDA initiative.

The project itself was split into three phases. First, creating and agreeing the text of the oneNDA document itself. Next, determine how to put oneNDA into practice and create the House Rules to govern its use. And, lastly, launching oneNDA alongside a suite of other artefacts that explain how it should be used and when to maximise adoption.

Electra Japonas, co-founder of oneNDA and CEO of tlb, said:

“The enthusiasm and commitment of the oneNDA Club, and the legal community, has been a real driving force to get us to where we are today…there were a few sceptics that didn’t believe we’d be able to do it, but here we are ready to prove them wrong!”

oneNDA is now live and ready for companies to download, use and adopt – and it’s all free! The organisers are aiming to get 1000 companies to formally adopt oneNDA by December 2021. You can find the oneNDA document, along with a number of resources on the oneNDA website – oneNDA.org.

Law Society of England and Wales president I. Stephanie Boyce said:

“As an in-house lawyer myself, I know how much time can be spent on non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) between commercial partners.

“The vast majority of NDA’s are boilerplate documents used tens of thousands of times per day in an entirely non-controversial way to protect potentially valuable business information.

“We welcome the idea of a standardised NDA template and will monitor the development of the oneNDA initiative with interest.”