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My favorite part about building enterprise software for legal and business teams is the product feedback loop. It’s our customers and users who define our product roadmap, and who guide us (sometimes loudly) toward innovative feature improvements.
As a result of this, we don’t have to be product visionaries as much as we have to be incredible listeners.
Over the last year, we’ve received hundreds of feature requests to improve our core products. I want to share 12 of the best requests that have made it into the core product in 2024.
Thanks so much for reading (and sharing your feedback)!
Top 12 Feature Requests in 2024
1. Can our sales team just forward your NDA link via email for the counterparty to initiate?
Earlier this year we launched SimpleForm, a counterparty initiated form that can be shared via link and that contains all of your template defaults and routing rules. Once the counterparty completes the form, the document is immediately routed for review and signature.
2. Can we proactively introduce negotiation options for jurisdiction, term length, and other commonly accepted fall backs to the counterparty (and avoid redlining for these deal terms)?
As part of the SimpleForm launch, we enabled this pre-negotiate capability. It allows you to introduce your fallbacks as primary options that can be selected by the counterparty while they’re completing the SimpleForm process.
3. Our sales team doesn’t typically know who will be signing/approving. Can we make it easy for the counterparty to reassign the agreement to someone else for review or signature?
We added this capability such that whomever receives the template at the counterparty can reassign to someone else. That can be an approver or signer. This was a necessary feature, as we’re asking our customers to stop attaching contracts as Word documents and instead route directly for electronic review. This produces a much faster time to signature, but also requires the ability for the NDA or other agreement type to be reassigned (which replaces the manual method which was the internal forwarding of a Word template).
4. How can we show our CEO/CFO the impact of AutoNDA? Can we show how much faster this is compared to our old process?
AutoNDA now offers an Insights dashboard where speed is reported in real time. We find that most businesses are unable to quantify how many steps it takes to get an NDA signed– but they do typically know how long it takes– and that number often ranges from 4 days to 2 weeks. What they see with AutoNDA is an average that’s at or below 1-day.
5. Our sales teams constantly ask us for the status of NDAs– have they been signed yet, approved yet? Can we push updates into Salesforce.com so they can track contract status themselves?
Our most important integration (after eSign) is CRM. This is where your sales team lives– and where they should be initiating new contracts. But it’s also where they should come to see status updates. Has the NDA been signed? And by whom? With our SDFC integration, we provide all of this data in real time and even attach the signed contract back to the SFDC record upon final execution.
6. Can we use your contract automation software to automate Health Care Professional (HCP) agreements between our global pharmaceutical company and our network of thousands of doctors?
It’s fascinating to see how many use cases there are for contract automation. We recently adapted our workflow software to accommodate HCP agreements. It was not appropriate to send these directly via eSign, as the doctor/signer needed the opportunity to review and in some cases negotiate. With SimpleDocs, we offer a dual experience where the HCP agreement can be signed immediately, amended in-app or downloaded for redlining. The result is that for the 90% that are signed without negotiations, the speed to sign goes from 4 days down to 30 minutes.
7. We use SharePoint to store the most current version of our templates– and we have a builder that enables sales people to populate the correct document and download into Microsoft Word. Can you replace this process with AutoNDA but in a way that’s integrated into SharePoint so the sales team can continue coming to a central hub for all templates including NDAs?
We can integrate just about anywhere– and we never want to force a new process or experience– especially with your business teams. We successfully integrate with all of the leading document management platforms, and can maintain continuity with whatever you’re using for your legal front door.
8. Can we set email alerts to go out to the legal team when an NDA is expiring?
We now offer alerts and it’s integrated into our SimpleDocs Repository. You can assign these email alerts to individuals or teams, and they can be customized or auto suggested based on key dates from within the document.
9. Can we use the SimpleDocs Repository to store and organize contracts signed outside of your platform?
We also now support Bulk Upload for legacy contracts. Using the most advanced GenAI, we can process any volume of active contracts and convert them into structured and searchable meta data. We can also auto apply alerts to the Bulk Upload process.
10. Our debt finance team receives a high volume of engagement letters from various valuation firms we employ to assess asset valuations for our borrowers. We’d like an AI generated summary of these letters as well as flags for missing provisions that we require in our engagement letters as a matter of policy. Can you enable this use case through your AI review software?
With SimpleAI Auto Review, you can email forward any PDF agreement type and receive a business and legal summary, as well as playbook generated change recommendations. This product is currently in Beta and will be available for global use in January, 2025.
11. We are a global organization with multiple divisions/legal entities – can we set up distinct workflows with distinct jurisdiction, signers, etc?
Yes, we now support multiple legal entities and divisions as part of our core workflow product. Each entity can contain its own default routing rules, approvers, signers, etc.
12. We are very protective of the data we share. We need the business teams to present a business case for each NDA request. Can we incorporate this into the AutoNDA process so that a business case can be presented for approval as part of the overall automation?
We now support advanced routing and approvals. We work with in-house IP teams that require business case approval for each NDA/CDA request, and our platform now is configurable to support any approval steps you may require.
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