Could You Be a Koncision Content Partner? (Including a Proposal to the National Venture Capital Association)

Our confidentiality-agreement template is just our first product. Next will be a version for the international market. After that, we may produce a “boilerplate” template containing all the stuff you find at the back of most contracts. It might even include—gasp!—indemnification provisions.

But beyond that, we plan on producing templates of different kinds of contracts. For that, we’ll need access to suitable subject-matter expertise—I have no qualms about being the editor of our confidentiality-agreement template, but I have a realistic view of my limits.

Presumably we could hire whatever experts we need, but an alternative and perhaps more interesting approach would be for Koncision to partner with suitable organizations.

For one thing, we could partner with any trade group looking to make its template contracts more useful.

An organization that comes to mind is the National Venture Capital Association, a trade association that represents the U.S. venture capital industry. It maintains on its website a set of model venture-capital financing documents, with the laudable aim of reducing the time and money spent—to use their words—”re-inventing the flat tire.”

But the model documents are in the form of annotated Word documents. That severely limits the scope for customization and annotation. And anyone who wants to use the model documents has to suffer the inefficiencies of the copy-and-paste process. Furthermore, the model documents use the traditional language of mainstream contract drafting, with all its inefficiencies.

So, NVCA, here’s what I suggest: Koncision will in consultation with your working group automate your model documents, in the process expanding the options (and related guidance) offered the user. We’ll also revise the language so that it complies with my book A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting—it’s in widespread use throughout the legal profession and is the clearest antidote to what ails contract language. The result? Your model contracts would be vastly more efficient. Users could create much more quickly contracts that better reflect their transaction. And making the contracts clearer and more concise would speed the negotiation process.

The model documents could be parked on an NVCA-branded site on ContractExpress.com. That could be how we’d be compensated for our work, but the money side of things could be arranged any number of ways.

So NVCA, have your people call my people! And if this sort of arrangement appeals to anyone else out there, do get in touch.

About the author

Ken Adams is the leading authority on how to say clearly whatever you want to say in a contract. He’s author of A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting, and he offers online and in-person training around the world. He’s also chief content officer of LegalSifter, Inc., a company that combines artificial intelligence and expertise to assist with review of contracts.

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