Bonterms Design Principles
Imagine mastering a system for 30 years and then being handed a blank sheet of paper and told to redesign it better. With no constraints.
That is, somehow, the true founding story of Bonterms.
Every day commercial contracts are now sent and negotiated, in minutes, on the Bonterms Platform. How did we get here?
We started at the core of the problem – the contract itself.
It's a vast, dug-in problem – the way contracts underlying $2T in annual IT spend are currently negotiated is a mess.
Our goal? To be the solution that gets the parties to consensus the fastest.
We spent our first year publishing free-to-use Standard Agreements that now cover nearly the entire scope of enterprise commercial transactions.
And then we carefully observed how they were being adopted in the wild.
Only at that point did we write these principles on the board and head for the races.
1. Build for the recipient.
Remarkably, nearly all software for contracts is one-sided. Yet ask anyone doing a deal how's it going and inevitably they'll complain about the other side – they're being unreasonable, too slow to send drafts or can't prioritize.
The fundamental challenge of contracts isn't helping one party figure out what to say, it's helping both parties say the same thing together. But to foster consensus, you need both parties in the same place. So from the initial invite until signature, we make it as easy as possible for a recipient to engage and negotiate on Bonterms.
2. Most issues are not zero sum.
Yes, the parties need to haggle over the multiplier in a damages cap, but why are contracts getting sent back and forth over choice of governing law?
With Auto-Accept Alternatives, we let the sender offer a range of acceptable choices to the recipient (New York, Delaware or California) so that round trips are reduced or eliminated. On Bonterms, 95% of NDAs go through in one pass, while still giving each party their say.
3. Every back and forth is a risk.
We talk a lot about time and cost in contracting, but probably underemphasize risk. Each time you volley a contract back you open an opportunity for your counterparty to lose budget, change employment or find something better to do for the rest of the week.
By starting the parties on a Standard Agreement and giving them a Standard Playbook for changes, Bonterms vastly reduces the surface area of what needs to be negotiated. The best solution doesn't make back and forth as easy as possible, it eliminates it altogether.
4. Free text is the last resort.
Free text is the moisture that destroys the foundation of a quick deal. Yet "working in Word" is a foundational principle of most contract solutions. On Bonterms you can conduct the entire negotiation with clicks and drag n' drops from your phone. Free text is available, but only if you actually need it.
What are your fundamental design principles?