Our NDAs Take Days to Turn Around: How to Speed Them Up

A non-disclosure agreement is usually the first paper two companies exchange, and it is almost always the least risky. Yet it is often the slowest step before a conversation can even start. A week disappears into a document that, in most cases, both sides would sign more or less as-is. When your NDAs take days, you are spending your scarcest review time on your lowest-stakes contract. The good news: NDAs are the easiest contract to make fast, because they are high-volume, low-variation and rarely deal-specific. If any contract in your business should be close to automatic, it is this one. ## Why NDAs take days (the real causes) - No standard NDA of your own. Every request starts from whatever the other side sends, so every NDA is a fresh negotiation of boilerplate.

• A lawyer touches every one. Even a clean, mutual NDA on standard terms sits in a legal queue behind real work.
• No agreed fallback positions. When the counterparty asks for a longer term or a one-way agreement, nobody knows the acceptable answer, so it escalates.
• Signature is a separate, manual step. Even once agreed, printing, scanning or chasing a signature adds another day.
• Requests arrive with no context. The reviewer has to work out who the counterparty is and why, before doing anything. None of these is about legal difficulty. They are about the absence of a standard and a fast path. ## The clauses that actually matter in an NDA To move fast you need to know the few things worth checking, so you can wave through everything else. The points that genuinely matter: - Mutual or one-way. A mutual NDA protects both sides and is usually the fastest to agree because it is balanced. Push for mutual by default.
• Definition of confidential information. It should be broad enough to protect you but carry the standard exclusions (already public, already known, independently developed, required to be disclosed by law).
• Term and survival. How long the obligation lasts, and whether it survives after the NDA ends. Two to five years is common; perpetual confidentiality is sometimes reasonable for genuine trade secrets.
• Permitted use and recipients. The information is used only for the stated purpose and shared only with people who need it.
• Return or destruction. What happens to the information when the discussion ends.
• Governing law and jurisdiction. This can vary by country; where the parties are in different jurisdictions, agree whose law applies early. Most NDAs that are mutual, time-limited, with standard exclusions and a clear purpose, need no debate at all. ## How to make NDAs same-day ### 1. Publish your own standard NDA Create a clean mutual NDA you are happy to sign and make it the version you send first. Negotiating from your paper, which already reflects positions you accept, is far faster than reacting to someone else's. ### 2. Pre-approve fallback positions Write down, in advance, the edits you will accept without escalation: for example, a term of up to five years, a specific carve-out for regulators, or switching to one-way where you are only receiving information. Now a non-lawyer can agree most NDAs because the answers are already decided. ### 3. Let non-lawyers self-serve the routine ones If the NDA is your standard, mutual, and within the pre-approved fallbacks, the deal owner should be able to send and sign it without waiting for legal. Legal defines the rules once, not every time. ### 4. Set a clear escalation line Only a short list should trigger review: unusual indemnities, non-compete or non-solicit language smuggled into an NDA, intellectual property assignment, unusually long or perpetual terms, or a counterparty insisting on their paper with heavy edits. Everything else flows. ### 5. Attach e-signature to the end of the flow Electronic signature removes the last day of delay. In most jurisdictions an NDA signed electronically is valid; confirm the position for your country and for any counterparty abroad. ### 6. Capture context at the request A one-line intake (counterparty, purpose, mutual or one-way) means whoever handles it never has to reconstruct the deal. ## What good looks like When this is in place, a routine NDA goes out on your standard paper, is agreed within your pre-approved fallbacks by the person who needs it, and is e-signed the same day. Legal sees only the genuine exceptions. You have moved your lowest-stakes contract off the critical path, which frees review time for the contracts that actually carry risk. ## When the standard, the playbook and signing live together An NDA is fast when the template, the agreed fallback positions and the signature are in one place, not spread across a drive, a wiki and a separate e-sign tool. A single AI contract workspace tuned to your company can generate your standard mutual NDA from a one-line brief, check a counterparty's version against your pre-approved positions and flag only the clauses that fall outside them, let you adjust terms in plain language, and send it for signature in the same flow, with a record of what was agreed. If you want to see that model, Adira is built around it. The principle is the same with any tool: standard paper, pre-decided fallbacks, self-serve for the routine ones. This article is general information, not legal advice. Confirm NDA terms and electronic-signature validity for your jurisdiction with your own counsel.