Anyone who has had anything to do with any type of start-up business, whether it be web 2.0 based or bricks & mortar, knows that you need a good lawyer. The frustrating thing is that when you are serious about your new business venture (as most are or they would not be taking the risk) you are often just as serious about the quality of legal advice you should have. The bummer is that high quality legal advice arrives with equally high costs- not ideal at all in a start-up situation.
Often initial legal advice for start-ups is restricted to contracts such as NDAs. Having been involved in a number of start-ups, this was the source of most of my frustration. Why should I pay top dollar for what is pretty much a cookie cut document that has had a bit of ‘find and replace’ treatment and then sold to me at some crazy lawyers price?
Problems of this nature can now be resolved with the help of new start-up Tractis. This new service is a web platform that allows you to negotiate, manage, and sign contracts 100% online and 100% legally binding. It is the brain child of the team at Negonation who proudly confess on their blog that will either achieve or die n their attempt to create ‘a legal system for the internet nation’. You certainly cannot suggest that this start-up is not committed with comments such as this 
Tractis incorporates a multilingual approach with content available in English and Spanish. There are a number of ways to take advantage of the service with the most simple being the use of existing contract templates. These template can be navigated easily thanks to a tagging function. There is also a rating function which will help users further narrow down their search for the appropriate contract template.
As far as cost is concerned, contract buyers (signers) need not pay a red cent and contract sellers (people who create the contract) get charged €1 per signature. As mentioned earlier in this post, the cost of legal help is typically crazy and Tractis becomes a really viable option with costs like this.
Closer to the middle of this month the development team at Tractis intend to launch a developer API. This will allow you to connect directly with our back-end and use digital certificates to authenticate your users, store documents, digitally sign contracts and ‘lots more’ according to the latest Negonation blog post.
Digitally creating & (particularly) signing off documents has been considered as being a little way off by the lawyers and doctors that I have mentioned this topic to. These are the two professions that seem to cling to the paper trail, often for reasons that are quite understandable. I am positive that most of us would like to see a well oiled paperless legal system before this type of thing is tried in the medical profession where lives are at stake.
So, if you have a great new idea and need a contract for an OEM software license or the like, why not try Tractis?
