# How we turn NDAs around in minutes, not days The NDA agent we run on Kortix — every 15 minutes it reviews a new inbound NDA against our standard playbook, redlines the non-standard terms in the document, and drafts a flag summary for counsel. It never signs or sends; counsel does. Canonical page: https://kortix.com/use-cases/nda-turnaround An NDA is the most standardized document a deal touches, and also the one most likely to sit in an inbox for two days waiting for someone with a law degree to open it. The deal doesn't move until it's signed, but the review itself is usually mechanical: the same eight or nine clauses, checked against the same standard positions, over and over. We run an NDA-turnaround agent on Kortix that watches for inbound NDAs and gives each one its first pass within fifteen minutes of arriving. It redlines what deviates from our standard positions and drafts a flag summary for counsel. It never signs anything and never sends anything to the counterparty — counsel does both. This is how we keep NDAs from being the thing a deal waits on. - **Team:** Kortix - **Runs on:** Every 15 minutes - **Connected systems:** Gmail · Google Drive · Google Docs - **Mode:** Redline + flag only · counsel signs ## The problem NDAs are high volume and low variance — most deals need one, and most of them follow the same handful of templates with the same handful of predictable deviations: a one-way instead of mutual, a perpetual confidentiality term, a non-solicit that reaches further than it should. None of that requires a first read from a lawyer. It just requires someone to check. But "someone" means counsel, and counsel's queue is full of things that actually need judgment. An NDA that's 90% standard waits behind a contract renegotiation, and the deal it's gating waits with it. By the time it gets reviewed, the delay has nothing to do with the document's complexity and everything to do with queue position. ## What we built On Kortix, a **cron** fires every 15 minutes and checks a watched Gmail label for a new inbound NDA. Each firing spawns a fresh session — a cloud sandbox — that saves the attached document into a Drive folder, opens it in Docs, checks it clause by clause against our standard NDA playbook, redlines every deviation as a suggested edit in the document, and drafts — never sends — a flag summary on the original email thread addressed to counsel. Counsel opens the thread to a redline and a summary instead of a blank document. ## How it works ### Run on a 15-minute cron A **cron trigger** checks the watched Gmail label every 15 minutes. Each firing spawns a fresh **session** in its own sandbox, seeded with whatever NDA is waiting. One NDA maps to one run on one disposable machine — nothing carries over between runs beyond what's already sitting in Gmail and Drive. ### Give the agent our standard positions Our standard NDA positions live as a **skill** loaded into every session: mutual vs. one-way, confidentiality duration, governing law, non-solicit scope, remedies, the residuals clause, return-or-destroy obligations, assignment, and indemnification. The agent checks against that standard instead of a generic sense of what an NDA should say. ### Connect what the review needs Through scoped **connectors**, brokered server-side so no raw token reaches the model, the agent: - **Reads the watched label in Gmail** — to find a new inbound NDA that hasn't already been processed. - **Saves the document to Google Drive** — into a dedicated NDA folder, so there's a durable copy to review and redline. - **Redlines in Google Docs** — every non-standard clause gets a suggested edit, never a direct change. ### Set the guardrails The agent's only outputs are a **Docs suggestion** and a **Gmail draft** — never a sent reply, never an applied edit, never a signature. Counsel reviews both and decides what goes back to the counterparty. Credentials are encrypted in the secrets manager and injected at runtime, scoped to the agents you grant them to or written to logs. ### Counsel picks it up already redlined With that in place, an NDA that lands at 9:03am has a redline and a flag summary waiting by 9:15 — the routine terms noted, the non-standard ones marked with the section and the reason, a proposed replacement already drafted. Counsel reviews, adjusts if needed, and sends. Nothing reaches the counterparty without that review. > **The pattern** > A 15-minute **cron** spawns a fresh session with scoped **connectors** into > Gmail, Drive, and Docs. Our standard positions live as a **skill**. The agent > redlines and flags; it never signs, executes, or sends. ## Guardrails An agent that touches an unsigned legal document needs a hard line between drafting and executing: - **Isolation.** Every run happens in its own isolated sandbox. The session is granted access only to Gmail, Drive, and Docs, and only the redline and the draft leave it. - **Scoped secrets.** The Gmail, Drive, and Docs credentials are encrypted in the secrets manager and injected into the sandbox at runtime, scoped to the agents you grant them to. - **Suggesting mode only.** Redlines land as Docs suggested edits, never a direct write to the document, and the original attachment is never overwritten, deleted, or moved. - **Never sign, execute, or send.** The flag summary is a Gmail draft on the original thread, never sent. The agent has no path to countersign an NDA or message the counterparty — counsel owns both. - **Everything is code.** The agent's playbook, skills, and per-system permissions are files in the repo, versioned and changed through a reviewed **change request** rather than a dashboard setting. ## The outcome - **15 minutes:** Longest an inbound NDA waits before its first pass - **Redline only:** Every change is a suggested edit, never applied - **3 systems:** Gmail, Drive, and Docs in one agent NDAs stop being the paperwork a deal waits on. Counsel opens a thread to a redline already marked against our standard positions and a summary of exactly what's non-standard and why, instead of a cold document. The agent does the first pass; counsel still signs off on every word that goes back to the counterparty.