Battery Ventures Cuts NDA Processing Time 42% and Frees 40 Hours a Month with Ontra's Contract Automation

Battery Ventures' investment teams historically handled all NDA negotiations themselves, manually comparing each document against the legal team's playbook and redlining it by hand — a process that took 30 to 45 minutes per NDA, several times a week. Rising fund sizes, growing deal volume, increasingly savvy counterparties, and the firm's expansion into Europe and Israel made NDAs more complex, and non-lawyer investors often lacked the expertise to negotiate terms confidently.

Battery adopted Ontra's Contract Automation platform, which combines purpose-built technology with a global network of legal professionals, to take over NDA negotiation on behalf of the investment teams. Ontra ensures terms align with Battery's internal playbook and preferences, handles both buy-side and sell-side NDAs, and taps local legal expertise to navigate jurisdiction-specific provisions across Battery's US and European deal activity.

NDA processing time dropped 42%, shrinking the end-to-end process from 7+ days to a meaningfully shorter timeframe on average, even as NDA volume grew substantially over three years. Investment teams reclaimed roughly 40 hours per month previously spent on manual redlining, and markups now turn around in as little as 24 hours. The legal team also reports that Ontra-negotiated NDAs often land more favorable terms than when deal teams handled them directly.

• Offloading routine contract negotiation to an automation + legal-network platform lets non-legal deal teams focus on sourcing and closing rather than redlining.
• A blended technology-plus-local-counsel model helps a globalizing firm keep pace with jurisdiction-specific contract norms without building out in-house expertise everywhere.
• Faster NDA turnaround is a competitive advantage in fast-moving deals where data-room access goes to whoever signs first.