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Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts

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Re: Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts

#141

Post by JadedBlueEyes »

jakestein wrote: post #108
snewman wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the value here is around starting with a known default . If someone hands you a contract which consists of a known boilerplate plus three changes, then (assuming you're already familiar with the boilerplate) you don't need to carefully read the entire contract word for word, you only need to look at the three changes, plus whatever customizations you'd like to propose. For the vast majority of the terms where…

The known default point is a big one, and making deviations visible is something we spend a lot of time thinking about. In our software, we make it easy for our users (and their customers) to know that nothing has been sneakily modified. We don't yet have a straightforward way to do that for people who are using the contracts on their own outside the software. The best bet for now is probably something like a text di…

Have you seen Ink & Switch's Upwelling (https://www.inkandswitch.com/upwelling/)? I think you might find it at least a little interesting, although it's more focused on non-fiction (where you trust all parties) than contracts. From a user perspective, it provides version control, diffing and both collaborative and private editing, all things that seem like they would be very useful when creating & editing contracts.

Re: Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts

#142

Post by neilv »

I can't tell from the Privacy Policy who can end up getting access to information about what contracts I'm signing, and with whom. Nor can I tell for what purposes they may use that information once they have access to it.

I suppose what I really want from business legal document facilitation is lawyer-like confidentiality, which is the opposite of the typical mindset of tech companies.

Re: Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts

#145

Post by jakestein »

r_hoods_ghost wrote: post #139

As far as I can tell there is no information provided about what information security measures are in place to protect this hugely juicy target full of commercially sensitive info, and an explicit disclaimer saying "hey folks we offer no guarantees about reliability, uptime or whether we'll disappear in a puff of smoke with all your contracts." Bit worrying

This is a fair critique. We recently kicked off a project to get our SOC 2 report/ audit, and we should add a section to our site about our information security measures. Thanks for flagging that.

While we don't offer uptime guarantees to users on our free tier, SLAs are an option for paying customers.

All of our users, free and paid, can download all of their contracts and the associated structured data from our system at any time if they'd like a backup. Our API also makes it possible to do this continuously.

Re: Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts

#146

Post by jakestein »

francoismassot wrote: post #137

This is awesome. I really like the fact that templates are available on GitHub: https://github.com/CommonPaper I cofounded a company that develop and sells an OpenSource software and it's a huge pain to write the contract. It's also costly... as I don't trust myself to write a contract and ask a lawyer to do it... I see that templates are more for cloud based offering but that would be great to extend this to on-prem…

Thank you, and you're correct that so far we've been mostly focused on cloud software so far. We've recieved some other requests for an on-premises contract as well, and we plan to add that.

The Cloud Service Agreement allows for a product with both on-prem and cloud-hosted components, so it might be a fit if you have a web-based control plane, for instance. However, if your product is purely on-prem, then the CSA is probably not the right fit.

Re: Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts

#148

Post by francoismassot »

jakestein wrote: post #146
francoismassot wrote: post #137

This is awesome. I really like the fact that templates are available on GitHub: https://github.com/CommonPaper I cofounded a company that develop and sells an OpenSource software and it's a huge pain to write the contract. It's also costly... as I don't trust myself to write a contract and ask a lawyer to do it... I see that templates are more for cloud based offering but that would be great to extend this to on-prem…

Thank you, and you're correct that so far we've been mostly focused on cloud software so far. We've recieved some other requests for an on-premises contract as well, and we plan to add that. The Cloud Service Agreement allows for a product with both on-prem and cloud-hosted components, so it might be a fit if you have a web-based control plane, for instance. However, if your product is purely on-prem, then the CSA is…

Yes, it's purely on-prem for now.

Will follow closely your development, don't hesitate to ping me if you need some inputs to work on an on-premise contract.

Re: Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts

#149

Post by jakestein »

JadedBlueEyes wrote: post #141
jakestein wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The known default point is a big one, and making deviations visible is something we spend a lot of time thinking about. In our software, we make it easy for our users (and their customers) to know that nothing has been sneakily modified. We don't yet have a straightforward way to do that for people who are using the contracts on their own outside the software. The best bet for now is probably something like a text di…

Have you seen Ink & Switch's Upwelling ( https://www.inkandswitch.com/upwelling/ )? I think you might find it at least a little interesting, although it's more focused on non-fiction (where you trust all parties) than contracts. From a user perspective, it provides version control, diffing and both collaborative and private editing, all things that seem like they would be very useful when creating & editing contracts…

I had not seen that, thanks for sharing. As you said, this is a different kind of version control from what we offer, but I think we could borrow some of their ideas, or at least use it as inspiration. It's very cool

Re: Launch HN: Common Paper (YC W23) – SAFEs for Commercial Contracts

#150

Post by jakestein »

neilv wrote: post #142

I can't tell from the Privacy Policy who can end up getting access to information about what contracts I'm signing, and with whom. Nor can I tell for what purposes they may use that information once they have access to it. I suppose what I really want from business legal document facilitation is lawyer-like confidentiality, which is the opposite of the typical mindset of tech companies.

I also often find it hard to get the information I actually care about from privacy policies. We tried to make it clear while checking the legal and compliance boxes we needed to, but I agree we can do better on that front. I'm also optimistic that this is an area where standards might be able to help, but I'm not a privacy policy expert and would need to do a lot more research to know for sure.

The short answer is that a subset of our team has the ability to access a user's contracts in order to provide support, fix bugs, and improve the product. We log instances when that access is used.

You're absolutely right that there are important differences between the attorney-client relationship versus the relationship with us or any other software provider. If that's not something you're comfortable with, then using the standard contracts without the software will probably be a better option.

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