The Common Paper Blog

Liability limits, or caps, are one of the most frequently negotiated terms in contracts. Whether you’re dealing with a widely used standard like the Cloud Service Agreement (CSA) or a bespoke contract that was written for a single deal, understanding how the limitation of liability works is crucial for vendors, customers, and other contract stakeholders. […]

In our previous Making Legal Your Superpower posts, we explored how to choose the right contract and the power of starting negotiations from a balanced position. Today, we’re tackling a challenge that every business faces: the pitfalls that can delay or derail even the most promising negotiations. As someone who has seen thousands of negotiations […]

It might seem counterintuitive to see a guide to modifying standard agreements on this blog. After all, a key feature of the Common Paper standards is consistency – the committee designed them to be applicable across many different companies and situations, and they are.  This is a consideration for all standards, and different agreements handle […]

Design partner programs are a valuable tool for founders, but there’s often confusion around the paperwork – especially when GDPR enters the picture. Let’s start with which contracts you might use and how they interact. The Basics of Design Partner Agreements and Data Processing When you’re running an early-stage startup, design partner programs can be […]

The Business Associate Agreement is one of the least-well-understood contracts that we deal with, and one of the most common questions we get is about the Underlying Agreement. I’m writing this post to help explain what you need to know about BAAs and how the underlying agreement is handled in Common Paper. The Basics: BAAs […]

In addition to ongoing subscription fees or usage based pricing, some B2B software vendors charge for implementation and other professional services. This is more common when selling to large enterprises, as they need more help with change management and often allocate budget for services along with any new software purchase. Companies that charge for professional […]

Standard contracts have a powerful network effect, and we’re seeing it in action at Common Paper.  Thousands of companies have signed contracts on our platform, and, on average, repeat recipients sign 52% faster than first-timers. As more companies review and sign the standard agreements, the odds get better for our users that the next contract […]

In the first post on our blog we laid out our vision that contracts should be APIs. Today, we’re excited to announce an important step to making that vision a reality: the official release of the Common Paper API.

At first glance, you may think Common Paper standard contracts are significantly different from what you’ve seen before. Standardization offers advantages over the traditional approach, where each company has its own bespoke template, and the standards are fully backward compatible with traditional contracts.

  I talk with a lot of founders of early-stage SaaS companies. They know that they need to have a contract in place with their customers, but they often get lost in the alphabet soup of NDAs, SLAs, DPAs, etc. They are focused on whatever it takes to close their first customers, and they are […]

As the lead designer at Common Paper, I love working with the visual elements that make our brand unique. But large background images can really hurt your load time. Here’s how we optimized ours.

I talk to a lot of founders about how much they hate contract negotiation. It slows down deals, increases costs, and adds compliance risks. When I tell them that I’m working on this problem, they’re often skeptical at first. Here’s how standard help your customers negotiate better.

TLDR: We just launched the standard Design Partner Agreement to help founders ground relationships with their earliest users and customers on solid footing. It’s free to download or use in our app.