Legal Document Assembly Using Google Docs

Thanks to a post on 3 Geeks and a Law Blog we learn that Kingsley Martin has developed a simple means of producing, via a Google Docs form, non-disclosure agreement minimally adjusted to your clients’ circumstances.

Martin runs a business that analyses legal agreements and develops software tools to help lawyers facilitate the production of contracts. He also publishes a blog and, as a service, Contracts Standards, that:

openly share[s] contract standards–transaction analysis, checklists, and clause libraries–in an effort to establish global contract norms.

Based on his Non-Disclosure Agreement Checklist, the form asks for a few inputs (date, names, etc.) and then ships you by email a ready-made agreement that captures the essentials. You can see a version of the uncompleted document here.

The point, of course, is not so much to improve the work of making NDAs as it is to demonstrate that there are many contracts having at their core common terms, which enables efficiency through standardization, and to show that something as simple as Google Docs can be used to manage document assembly.