Walkthrough: an NDA from request to signature

The request

A person asks in their own words

It starts with someone in the company who needs an NDA, for example before a first conversation with a supplier. They describe what they need in their own words, by form or by email. Colibit’s intake assistant reads the text and shows what it understood: the kind of contract, the other party, the country.

Then it asks only for what is missing, in plain questions. What counts as missing is decided by the company’s rules, not by the assistant, so two requests of the same kind are always asked the same things.

A request can start in one of three ways: from the company’s template as it is, from the template with a change the other party asked for, or from the other party’s own paper. This walkthrough follows the first. The third is in the walkthrough of the other party’s paper.

The checks

The other party is checked before anyone negotiates

Before a lawyer spends any time, Colibit checks who is on the other side. It compares the request with agreements already on file, looks at whether the other party’s country is on the company’s list of restricted countries, and screens its name against sanctions lists. Where a company registry is connected, it also looks the company up.

Each result is stored with the evidence it relied on. A clean result moves the request on by itself. A doubtful result, or a check that could not run, becomes a decision pending for a lawyer, with the reason written next to it. The checks are described in their own walkthrough.

The draft

The company’s template, filled in

Colibit fills the company’s approved Word template from the request: the parties, the date, the term. No model writes contract text. The template and its approved clauses do.

Before anyone reads the draft, a legal check looks for the mistakes that waste a lawyer’s time: a term used but never defined, an amount whose figures and words do not match, a reference to a clause that does not exist, an empty field. A draft that fails the check cannot move on.

Then come the approvals the company’s rules ask for. They depend on the type of contract and on whether the draft departs from the company’s standard text. An approval is a step the agent cannot complete: only a person with enough authority can.

The signature and the record

A person signs, and the agreement is filed

Once the approvals are complete, Colibit checks the person who will sign for the other party and builds the signature package from the approved version. It goes to the signers in order through a signature platform: the other party’s signer first, then the company’s signatories. Signing is always a person’s act. Colibit never signs for anyone.

When the platform reports that everyone has signed, Colibit stores the signed agreement with its details, reads the dates that matter and sets the alerts that will warn the legal team before a deadline. The request closes with a stated reason.

The five stages of this walkthrough, in order:

• Request. A person describes what they need.

• Checks. The other party is checked.

• Draft. The template is filled in and approved.

• Signature. People sign, in order.

• Record. The agreement is filed and its dates are watched.

What happens after the record is the subject of the last walkthrough.