You Don’t Need a Lease to Tour an Apartment—So Why Demand an NDA from Every Vendor?

We sign NDAs by reflex. What if we stopped to ask whether they’re even necessary?

Think about it: you don’t need to sign a lease just to tour an apartment. Yet in procurement, we routinely demand NDAs before we’ve even decided if a vendor’s offering is a fit.

We’re over-papering early-stage conversations, and that’s creating friction where there should be none.

Contents

• Contents
• The NDA Reflex and Its Hidden Cost
• Not Every Conversation Requires a Contract
• In Procurement, It’s Slowing You Down
• A Modern Default: Baseline Confidentiality
• Let’s Rethink What Needs Papering
• Ready to Join the NDA-Free Future?
• No More NDAs. That’s the Goal.

The NDA Reflex and Its Hidden Cost

If you work in-house, chances are you’ve seen this scenario: someone identifies a promising new vendor, a quick RFI goes out, and before any useful information can be shared, Legal is asked to draft or review an NDA. Why? “Because that’s just how we do it.”

This kind of default behavior adds hidden cost. NDAs aren’t free. Each one takes time to draft, redline, negotiate, route for signature, and track. That may feel minor in isolation, but multiplied across dozens or hundreds of vendors a year, it becomes a material drag on legal capacity.

More importantly, this reflex reinforces the narrative that Legal is a bottleneck. At a time when legal departments are facing rising workloads with flat budgets and limited headcount, scrutinizing low-value activity is critical. As Thomson Reuters puts it: “Legal departments are now being challenged to act more like a business function,” with pressure to drive efficiency and demonstrate value.

Not Every Conversation Requires a Contract

Confidentiality matters. But not every business conversation needs a contract to enforce it.

We regularly exchange sensitive information in contexts where no NDA is used: job interviews, partnership explorations, early-stage fundraising, and more. In many cases, mutual interest and basic professional norms are enough to govern discretion—especially when there’s no deal yet on the table.

There are also well-established legal doctrines that protect against misuse of information, such as misappropriation of trade secrets or implied duties of confidentiality. While not a perfect substitute, these frameworks reflect the reality that not all trust has to be “papered” to be respected.

And while statistics on NDA enforcement are scarce, it’s widely understood among in-house counsel that most NDAs are never litigated. In practice, the value of an NDA is often more symbolic than substantive. It signals intent, rather than deterring misconduct.

In Procurement, It’s Slowing You Down

The NDA reflex is especially problematic in procurement workflows.

In a typical multi-vendor RFI, procurement teams might need to engage with five or ten potential suppliers just to narrow the field. If each of those suppliers requires a bespoke NDA before sharing basic product roadmaps or pricing frameworks, the process stalls before it even begins.

These delays can add days or weeks to an evaluation cycle—not because of vendor responsiveness, but because of legal drag. That’s not just inefficient; it undermines the very purpose of procurement: to identify, compare, and contract with the right vendor quickly and responsibly.

We explore this dynamic in more detail in The Fastest Way to Evaluate 10 Vendors.

A Modern Default: Baseline Confidentiality

At BeyondNDA, we’ve seen firsthand how wasteful traditional NDA processes can be—especially in early-stage, low-risk interactions.

That’s why we created a new model: one-time membership, mutual coverage, instant enforceability. Instead of signing a new NDA for every interaction, members agree once to uphold the Fabric of Confidentiality. It’s backed by legal obligations and recorded cryptographically for auditability.

The goal isn’t to remove protection; it’s to remove friction. Legal teams still get enforceability. But now they can focus their attention on strategic work instead of rubber-stamping the same boilerplate 50 times a quarter.

You can explore how it works here or see who’s already joined the roster.

Let’s Rethink What Needs Papering

The next time someone asks, “Can you send over an NDA?”—pause.

Ask whether the information being shared is truly confidential. Ask whether the parties involved have a track record of respecting professional norms. Ask whether your legal team’s time is best spent reviewing this agreement—or whether you’ve already covered the same ground a dozen times this quarter.

You wouldn’t sign a lease just to tour an apartment. So why treat every vendor intro like a long-term commitment?

Ready to Join the NDA-Free Future?

If you’re still stuck in the old world of 1:1 NDA negotiations, there’s a better option waiting. BeyondNDA lets you skip the paperwork—but not the protection.

✅ One-time signup

✅ Instant coverage with all members

✅ Enforceability backed by law and cryptography

We built BeyondNDA to fix this problem—and I invite you to join.

It’s free, fast, and built for the way modern legal teams work.

👉 Join here in 10 minutes → beyondnda.com/ilan

No More NDAs. That’s the Goal.

At BeyondNDA, our mission is simple: No More NDAs.

We believe companies should be able to rely on baseline expectations of trust and fairness in early business conversations without needing lawyers, redlines, or delays.

The law may still require a legal mechanism for confidentiality, but that doesn’t mean we have to keep doing it the hard way.

BeyondNDA is that mechanism. Modernized, standardized, and built to scale.