Of all the paperwork in a deal, the NDA is the most predictable. It's also the thing most likely to sit unopened for two days until a lawyer gets to it. Nothing else moves until it's signed, and yet reviewing it is mostly routine: the same eight or nine clauses, held up against the same house positions, again and again.

Our answer is an agent on Machine that keeps an eye out for incoming NDAs and gives each one a first read within fifteen minutes of it landing. It marks up whatever departs from our standard positions and writes a draft note for counsel. It cannot sign, and it cannot send anything to the other side. Both of those stay with counsel. That's how NDAs stopped being the hold-up on our deals.

The problem

NDAs arrive constantly and barely change from one to the next. Nearly every deal needs one, and they come from a small set of templates with a small set of familiar wrinkles: one-way where it should be mutual, confidentiality that never expires, a non-solicit that reaches too far. Spotting those doesn't need a lawyer's first read. It just needs somebody to look.

In practice, though, that somebody is counsel, and counsel's desk is stacked with work that really does need judgment. A mostly standard NDA queues behind a contract renegotiation, and the deal waits with it. By the time it's read, the delay has nothing to do with how hard the document is. It's all about where it sat in the pile.

What we built

A cron on Machine goes off every 15 minutes and looks in a watched Gmail label for a fresh NDA. Each run gets its own clean cloud computer, or sandbox. The agent saves the attachment into a Drive folder, opens it in Docs, and works through it clause by clause against our standard NDA playbook. Every departure becomes a suggested edit right in the document. Then it writes a summary of the flags as a draft reply to counsel on the original email thread, and leaves it unsent. Counsel opens the thread and finds a markup and a summary, not a blank page.

How it works

The pattern

Every 15 minutes a cron starts a clean session with limited connectors into Gmail, Drive and Docs. Our standard positions are kept as a skill. The agent marks up and flags, and it never signs, executes or sends.

Guardrails

When an agent handles an unsigned legal document, preparing it and executing it have to be kept firmly apart:

• Isolation. Each run has a sandbox to itself, with access to Gmail, Drive and Docs and nothing else. The markup and the draft are the only things that come out.
• Scoped secrets. The Gmail, Drive and Docs keys are stored encrypted in the Secrets Manager and only handed to the agents you grant them to, when the sandbox starts.
• Suggestions only. Every change shows up as a suggested edit in Docs, not a direct change to the text. The original attachment is never overwritten, deleted or moved.
• Never sign, execute, or send. The flag summary sits as an unsent Gmail draft on the original thread. The agent has no way to countersign or to contact the other party. Both belong to counsel.
• Everything is code. The playbook, skills and the permissions for each system are versioned files in the repo, changed only through a reviewed change request, never a dashboard toggle.

The outcome

NDAs are no longer the paperwork holding up a deal. Instead of a cold document, counsel opens a thread with the markup already done against our positions and a short summary of what's unusual and why. The agent takes the first read. Counsel still approves every word that goes back to the other party.