Jake Stein

I’m the CEO of Common Paper and this is the third startup I’ve co-founded. I’ve looked at a lot of SaaS contracts. In this article I’m going to walk you through how a founder and CEO of a SaaS company would approach building a contract playbook. If you’re a CEO, operations leader, or deal desk […]

Nearly everyone in contract review has already tried Claude or ChatGPT. Here’s what chat assistants do well, where they fall short, and why the core problems of contract review are still unsolved.

A customer sends back your contract with 15 redlines at 4pm on the last day of the month. Someone has to decide what to accept and what to push back on. At most growing software companies, you won’t yet have an in-house attorney, so that someone ends up being a founder, a RevOps lead, or […]

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. […]

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 […]

  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 […]

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.

Founder and CEO Jake Stein has seen a lot of negotiations across his career. Some good, some bad, and some very ugly.

We believe in a world where contracts are APIs, and we’re building the platform to make it a reality. I’m delighted to announce the launch of our structured contract platform and open source Cloud Service Agreement. Plus, we raised a $4.5 million seed funding round from some incredible investors who share our vision.