Extra Eagle

One of the most exhilarating times is when you are bringing in a new client, a new business partner or supplier. But the practical tasks involved are annoying and tedious. Preparing that word template, emailing, fedexing, printing, faxing are all annoyances we just want to get rid of.

Agree2 has always been about getting rid of these annoying steps. They really feel like they should have been left in the 1980s together with our snow wash jeans. While we were clearly better than the alternative, our own multi-step process still felt like it could be improved.

So we went back to the drawing board and completely redesigned the way you create agreements in Agree2.

As you can see this process is now unbelievably fast. However you are still free to manually invite parties to the agreement as you would before.

It’s helping me personally. While I am not a big fan of NDA’s they are necessary every now and again. Just this morning I had to create a NDA for a potential partner while we were chatting on Skype. I picked Lex Publica’s great new Mutual Confidentiality Agreement and by the time I told him to check his mail I received an email from Agree2 saying he had accepted it. In less than a minute I had created the agreement and both of us had signed it and our now confidential chat continued.

LexPublica is a fantastic new initiative to create a set of standard open source contract templates that anyone can use.

No one can afford lawyers. Individuals, professionals and small businesses can’t afford lawyers. Startups can’t afford lawyers. Big companies with large budgets for legal services struggle to afford lawyers. Even lawyers complain, genuinely, that they can’t afford lawyers.

Zak Greant from LexPublica was nice enough to add their Mutual Confidentiality Agreement to Agree2 and we will be adding the rest shortly.

One really nice thing about their templates is that they have been written and vetted by a community of lawyers and also come with good instructions similar to what you should be receiving from a lawyer. See these guidelines for the Simple Mutual Confidentiality Agreement

If you do need to create an NDA in the future please do consider using theirs.

Several of our users have asked us for the possibility of attaching files to an agreement. This is a little more complicated a request than you might think due to our approach of recording evidence during the life time of the agreement, but I think we came up with a good simple way of handling it.

You can only attach and remove files during drafting. This is to ensure that no changes are made to the attachments afterwards.

But first of all how does it work?

You will find the “Attach file” button just below the “Add party” button.

Now just pick your file add a description and hit “Attach file”

Now it is available at the bottom of your agreement:

So far it’s just like any other file attachment.

Where is the evidence?

Agree2 provides an Evidence Browser that all parties investigate the full audit trail of the agreement. Click on your agreements “Tools” button and then the “View evidence” button:

What we actually do though is record an event in the agreements evidence browser every time the attachment is created and deleted as well as the first time it is viewed. This together with all the other evidence we store in the evidence browser should provide everything you need to prove what went on with the email. Try that in email?

Here you can see I deleted the attachment and added a new one:

Attachments is available on our Small plan and above. This runs at only $12/month and also allows multiple account users so it’s ideal for a small business. Click on the “Account” link at the very top of the page to upgrade your plan.

Better invitation

When inviting someone to an agreement, they would previously get one email that you could not reply to. We have split the invitation into two parts, so that there are now two emails. One email contains the text of the agreement. As an Agree2 customer who invites someone to an agreement, you will now appear as the sender of this email, so that invited parties can now respond directly to you, simply by replying to that email.

For security reasons, the private link to the agreement is sent in a second, seperate email.

We hope that these changes provide a better experience for your customers/clients/partners.