The forms most companies redraft are the ones they should standardize.
Walk into the contracts folder of almost any growing company and you will find the same thing: forty versions of a Mutual NDA. Three competing MSAs. A DPA written for a 2019 deal that no one has touched since. A BAA that an outside firm typed up in 2022 and charged seven thousand dollars for. Every form was custom-drafted by someone, somewhere, on the clock — and now they all sit next to each other, lightly contradictory, none of them quite right for the next deal.
This is the work the billable hour was built to harvest. The redraft of the redraft. The third turn of the document that should not have been redrafted in the first place. It looks like legal work. It is mostly clerical work charged at legal rates.
There is a different shape available, and we adopted it. Roadmap uses the Bonterms standard agreements as the default templates for our practice. Neutral forms, drafted and maintained by a standing committee of 120+ in-house lawyers from companies like Atlassian, Dropbox, Snowflake, and Stripe, published under Creative Commons. The base terms do not move from deal to deal. The cover page does. That is where the negotiation lives — and that is the page your Roadmap attorney customizes for your business.
Roadmap adopted the Bonterms standard. The base terms are neutral. The cover page is yours.
Why standards beat bespoke for routine work.
Standardization is not a downgrade. It is what every other mature category has already done. Treasury bonds are standard. ISDA master agreements are standard. The shipping container is standard. The reason these standards win is the same in every case: when both sides recognize the form, the negotiation moves to the parts that actually differ between this deal and the last one, and the rest of the document stops being a place where billable hours can hide.
Bonterms applies that logic to the contracts companies sign every week. The Mutual NDA is a Mutual NDA. The Cloud Terms are the Cloud Terms. Your sales team and the counterparty's procurement team can pull up the same base document, agree it on its face, and spend their attention on the cover page — purpose, term, AUP, security posture, SLAs, caps. The third turn looks like the first turn. Routine deals close in days, not weeks.
The Bonterms forms are also good. The committee includes lawyers who have negotiated thousands of these documents on both sides, and the templates were published in 2022 under Creative Commons (CC BY 4.0 and CC0 1.0, depending on form) precisely so the market could converge on one well-drafted version instead of forty mediocre ones. We did not pick them because they were cheap. We picked them because they were better than what most outside firms would draft from scratch — and because the standardization itself creates leverage we can hand to our clients.
How we use them.
The base templates are the starting point, not the finish line. Every Bonterms form your business uses is customized by your Roadmap attorney before it ever lands in front of a counterparty.
The customization happens on the cover page. Your security measures, your acceptable use policy, your support policy, your SLA tiers, your liability caps, your insurance requirements, your governing law — these get filled in once, by a licensed attorney, against your business posture. The cover page is your business. The base terms are the market.
When you send the document, the counterparty sees a form they recognize and a cover page that is specifically yours. The negotiation does not get lost in re-litigating boilerplate. It moves to the handful of variables that actually matter for the deal in front of them. The attorney on your engagement runs that negotiation through your Roadmap Slack channel — supervised, on the record, inside the engagement, included in the subscription.
Self-serve from your portal.
The templates are part of the subscription. When you sign up for Counsel, you get access to them from the Roadmap portal — your business's customized cover page, attached to the canonical Bonterms base, ready to send. Pull a Mutual NDA the same way you would pull a sales-tracker template. Send it. The matter opens in your Slack channel automatically; the negotiation runs through your Roadmap attorney from there.
If you would rather hand the request off entirely, type /contract in your Roadmap Slack channel, name the counterparty and the deadline, and we run the document from your cover-page set against their markup. Either path. Same forms, same subscription, same engagement.
Templates do not leave the subscription. Counterparty markup goes through attorney review. The clean execution copy is delivered through the channel. Nothing about the standardization changes the privilege story or the review discipline — what it changes is how much of the routine work disappears into a form that both sides already trust.
If you are a Roadmap subscriber, we use Bonterms by default for commercial matters.
This is the headline. If you subscribe to Roadmap Counsel, your commercial matters — the Mutual NDAs, the Cloud Terms, the MSAs, the DPAs, the BAAs — run on Bonterms templates and, where it makes operational sense, on the Bonterms delivery platform. We chose this for our practice as a business‑and‑client decision because the forms are excellent: well‑drafted, market‑tested, recognized by counterparties on sight, and built to be customized at the cover page rather than redrafted from scratch. Using them is how we move fast on the commercial work that would otherwise eat hours of bespoke drafting and bill them back to you at legal rates.
You do not have to ask for this. You do not have to pick a "Bonterms delivery" toggle. There is nothing to pick. Where the form fits the work, we use the form — same Slack channel, same attorney, same fixed fee on the matter quote, same review discipline, all inside your existing subscription. This is operator‑side. We made the call. You get the leverage.
Roadmap subscribers don’t opt in to Bonterms. We use it by default for commercial matters — because the forms are great and the standardization compounds in your favor.
If you specifically want to run your commercial workflow on the Bonterms platform, we’ll set you up.
Some legal teams have decided, independently, that they want their commercial agreements to live on the Bonterms platform end‑to‑end — templates, negotiation, signature, repository, the whole flow on Bonterms infrastructure. If that’s you, and you’re also a Roadmap subscriber, we run your commercial work natively on the Bonterms platform. Same firm, same attorney, same subscription — your platform of choice. Tell us in your Slack channel and we’ll set the workflow up that way for your account.
And if you’re not yet a subscriber: same firm, Bonterms‑counsel path.
If you are not a Roadmap subscriber and you want same‑firm delivery on Bonterms templates without committing to a subscription, we run a per‑matter intake at useroadmap.co/bonterms. Card on file at engagement (no charge), fixed‑fee quote per matter from the pricing engine, pay on acceptance, receive the work. Same attorneys and the same review discipline we apply to subscriber matters — without the subscription bundle (no template library, no per‑client Slack channel, no day‑to‑day coverage, no calendar access). It is the front door when a Bonterms‑flavored matter is the first thing you need from a law firm. Most clients who come in this way eventually subscribe; some don’t, and that’s fine too.
What's not in the set.
Two notes on scope. First, the Bonterms catalog includes a draft set of AI Standard Clauses. We have not adopted those. The technology is moving too fast for a 2024-vintage standard to bind a customer through a 2026 procurement cycle, and we would rather draft those provisions deal-by-deal until the market settles. Second, the Bonterms forms are commercial templates — they are not a substitute for bespoke financing documents, employment agreements with unusual structures, or M&A diligence sprints. Those run through the same engagement, same Slack channel, same attorney, scoped alongside the subscription as fixed-fee work.
Roadmap Counsel is the law firm. The Bonterms set is one of the things the law firm gives you, because it is what we would have built ourselves if a standing committee of 120+ in-house lawyers had not already done the better version.
The close.
Standardize what should be standard. Customize what should be customized. Run the negotiation on the page that actually matters. Attach the base by reference. Keep the matter in the channel, on the engagement, with the attorney. The work that used to take five turns and a partner's signature takes a cover page and an afternoon.
Neutral forms. Customized covers. Attorney‑reviewed. Three doors: subscribe and let us use Bonterms by default, subscribe and run end‑to‑end on the Bonterms platform, or come through the Bonterms‑counsel path.
See the live status of each template on the Bonterms page. Start a Roadmap subscription at /start, or engage on the Bonterms‑counsel path at /bonterms.