Law Insider and the team behind oneNDA have launched oneSaaS, a community-driven standard contract template for cloud services agreements. It will address the inefficiencies in drafting, negotiation and managing these highly-used contracts.
Over 600 comments from 300 lawyers were gathered to help produce the standard oneSaaS contract, which organisations are invited to adopt and use for free. And this particular contract really matters, given that 30 million SaaS agreements are signed every year.
Electra Japonas, Chief Legal Officer at Law Insider, told Artificial Lawyer: ‘Our goal with oneSaaS is simple: to provide a universally recognized standard for cloud services agreements that fosters efficiency, collaboration, and innovation across the industry. We believe this tool will save legal and business teams significant time and resources while promoting the network benefits of a global standard.’
Japonas explained that they examined around 1,000 SaaS contracts using AI and found that there were 52 key clauses that constituted a SaaS agreement. However, across the corpus there were 819 different clause titles, and in fact about 95% of all the SasS contracts examined were loosely the same in terms of language meaning, but used a wide range of wording….to do the same thing.
It was clear that after the previous success of oneNDA, as well as oneDPA, that oneSaaS was therefore going to be essential.
‘There is so much renaming and tinkering [of clauses]. Let’s just call them what they are and use them as building blocks,’ Japonas added. ‘If you’ve reviewed one of these contracts, you’ve reviewed them all. [They are the same thing] just using different words and that’s because lawyers like to express things in their own style. But this trumps functionality and efficiency.’
Plus, she stressed, ‘it costs millions for organisations to have these bottlenecks’ around contract formation and use, for what are documents that really are – as Law Insider has shown – quite standard. And if that’s the case, then producing a true universal standard that the legal world can get behind and use makes a lot of sense.
She also noted that all of this unnecessary variation just added ‘trauma into that contract’, but which didn’t need to be there.
So, what does oneSaaS offer? Here’s an overview:
- ‘AI-Enhanced Insights: Leveraged AI analysis of Law Insider’s public database to create a practical, data-driven starting place.
- Community-Driven Collaboration: Developed with input from a global community of 300+ legal professionals and SaaS providers from companies including H&M, United Nations, IATA and OneTrust.
- Streamlined Contracting: Reduces negotiation times, legal costs, and operational bottlenecks while increasing consistency and scalability.
- Free and Open-Source: Available to all organizations, regardless of size or resources at no cost.’
And here is why they believe it matters:
- ‘Saves time by standardizing agreements, cutting down on drafting and review cycles.
- Reduces costs by eliminating inefficiencies in custom contracting.
- Promotes collaboration between SaaS providers and buyers through a clear, shared framework.
- Enhances scalability, enabling organisations to manage high volumes of contracts with ease.’
Japonas, who joined Law Insider last year, concluded by saying that more standard contracts would be developed using the same targeting and approach. And this is because: ‘A lack of standards is a detriment to the consumers and a detriment to the business.’
You can find and download the oneSaas standard agreement here.
