Electra Japonas

tlb (The Law Boutique)

When was the last time you litigated an NDA? “Close to never” is the answer entrepreneur Electra Japonas heard repeatedly. Her business spent the vast majority of its time working on NDA agreements, even though they accounted for a negligible amount of revenue.

Early last year, the founder and CEO of legal optimisation company The Law Boutique decided there should be an industry standard around NDAs to save everyone time. A LinkedIn post about the idea reached 35,000 hits; a steering committee involving in-house lawyers from the likes of Google, Astrazeneca, Barclays and Deliveroo was formed and 335 organisations signed up for workshops that led to the creation of a free, open-source NDA template. With 7,000 downloads and 500 companies adopting it, the idea resulted in a commercial partnership that will see Japonas earn 50 per cent of the revenue and reinvest it to improve the template.

Japonas started The Law Boutique in 2017 as a managed services business for clients like Stripe, Babylon and Remote. It has evolved into a legal design consultancy, OneNDA, focused on rethinking documents and the customer journey for companies to make them both more user friendly. The business has quadrupled in size during Covid-19, turning OneNDA into one of Japonas’s biggest marketing moves.