NDA / MSA Request & Legal Approval Workflow: Stop Chasing Legal by Email

The problem this kills

You found a supplier you want to work with, and before anything can move you need an NDA in place. So begins the chase. You email legal the counterparty name and what you're trying to do. Legal asks which template. Someone attaches a draft. The supplier sends back redlines in a file named NDA_final_v2_REALLYfinal.docx. Three reply-all threads later, nobody is sure which version is current, whether legal actually signed off, or who is waiting on whom. Meanwhile the project that needed the NDA is stalled.

Then it gets worse. A second person on your team, not knowing the first request exists, kicks off another NDA with the same supplier. The executed PDF, when it finally lands, gets saved to someone's Downloads folder and is never findable again. An auditor asks "where's the signed MSA for this vendor?" and the answer is a shrug. The work isn't hard — it's just scattered across inboxes, untracked, and impossible to prove. You do not need to be a developer to fix this.

What you'll build

A simple internal web tool for requesting and tracking standard agreements — NDAs, MSAs, DPAs, and whatever else you run. A requester submits a request: the counterparty, the agreement type, the purpose, the key terms, and whose paper it's on (yours or theirs). The tool routes it to the right approver by type — NDAs to one reviewer, MSAs to legal, and so on — so nothing lands in the wrong inbox. As the counterparty sends changes, you track each redline round as a linked version, so the current draft is always obvious and the history is intact. The approver reviews the final version and approves it — that's the gate; nothing is marked approved-to-sign until a person signs off. After signature, a person uploads and confirms the executed copy, and the tool files it in your contract repository with metadata (counterparty, type, effective date, term, renewal). You get a status dashboard, turnaround-time tracking, reminders so nothing stalls, and a CSV export. Unmodified standard templates can skip legal — and every request links to your onboarding doc checklist.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The downloadable plan is a step-by-step file you paste into an AI coding agent. It opens by interviewing you about your business — your agreement types and who approves each, your current request-and-chase process, the exact terms you capture, your "whose paper" and template rules, your redline reality, where your contract repository lives, and your messy edge cases — so the tool fits your legal process, not a generic template. From there it walks the agent through the data model, the request form, the type-based routing, version tracking for redlines, the approval gate, the executed-copy confirmation, the repository filing with metadata, and the dashboard, reminders, and export. Every step ends with a ready-to-copy prompt. There's also a "No API yet?" path: keep requests and status in a Google Sheet or CSV and documents in file Storage, and export a clean CSV in the exact columns your system of record expects — so you can build and use the whole tool today, with no integration at all.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

The whole reason to do this in a real tool instead of email is the controls it bakes in: login so only your procurement and legal team can use it; row-level security so you only ever see your own organization's agreements; a complete audit trail of who requested, routed, redlined, approved, and confirmed what, and when; a hard human-approval gate where the approver must review and approve the final version before it can be marked approved-to-sign, and the executed copy is recorded only after a person confirms the signature; and duplicate guards keyed on counterparty plus agreement type, so you can't accidentally open two NDAs with the same supplier — one active agreement of each type per counterparty, with versions linked to it.

Who it's for

Procurement and operations staff who need an NDA, MSA, or DPA in place to start working with a supplier, and who currently chase legal by email, lose track of redline versions, and can never find the executed copy later. If you can describe your agreement types and who approves them, you can build this.

You've got this — start with the plan, paste the first prompt, and answer a few questions about how your agreements actually get done. Your first tracked request is minutes away.