Modern Law Magazine Issue 65

INTERVIEWS
INTERVIEWS
Innovation Through
Collaboration
Electra Japonas is the Founder and CEO of a TLB,
contract specialist company that partners with
customers to provide comprehensive contract
review support and takes contract functionality to
new heights through the transformative force of
legal design and operations. In March 2021, Electra
also co-founded oneNDA, a game-changing opensource,
collaborative initiative that has witnessed
extraordinary support. With over 1000 companies
formally adopting oneNDA as their go-to Non-
Disclosure Agreement (NDA) and more than 50,000
downloads, its impact is undeniable.
Before establishing TLB, Electra honed
her skills and knowledge over a decade
in prominent organisations, including the
European Space Agency, Disney, BAT,
and EY, where she played pivotal roles in
commercial legal and data protection. It
was during this time that she recognized
a crucial void in the market—an
opportunity to create a legal company
that embraced a holistic approach to
support, transcending the confines of
traditional law and contracts in particular.
TLB’s vision is to redefine the way
organisations perceive, utilise and glean
value from their contracts process by
infusing it with innovation, strategy,
technology and a deep understanding of
user experience.
oneNDA is a crowd-sourced, opensource
non-disclosure agreement
that has been created by the legal
community. And it’s entirely free to use.
oneNDA believes that if we all started
from the same NDA template, we would
save enormous amounts of time, money
and effort. No more battle of the forms
and no more negotiating terms that are
not market standard or add little-toknow
value. Businesses would be able to
get to the commercial deal quicker, and
lawyers would have more time to spend
on the more strategic work. Through
her innovative thinking, unwavering
determination, and commitment to a
more privacy-conscious future, Electra
Japonas continues to lead oneNDA
on its mission to empower individuals
and foster a safer and more secure and
collaborative digital landscape.
I sat down with Electra to talk about
a mantra of hers, ‘Innovation Through
Collaboration.’ This is something that is
at the core of oneNDA, and is something
Electra truly believes is the best way to
push the legal profession into the future,
and to ensure its survival.
How do you define “innovation
through collaboration” within
the legal profession, and why is
it important in today’s rapidly
evolving technological landscape?
‘Innovation through collaboration’
is a term we used heavily during the
oneNDA initiative. In fact, the Financial
Times awarded us for just that -
Innovation Through Collaboration.
What we created with oneNDA was
a crowd-sourced project with a load
of lawyers from all over the world
who wanted to create something that
was going to benefit them in their
profession and benefit their businesses
as a result. The way that I see the
legal profession is that we are still,
unfortunately, very siloed. You get
lawyers working in law firms that don’t
talk to other law firms and you get
in-house lawyers that don’t necessarily
talk to the rest of the business. I think
what happens as a result is that it’s
really difficult for you to get different
perspectives, it’s very difficult for you
to leverage things that other people
have come up with which might be
better ways of working. As a result we
are not collaborating as much as we
could. We are stifling our profession
to an extent. Look to the software
industry as an example of collaboration
from the outset. I appreciate it’s a
very different profession, but when
software developers realised software
was becoming a vital part of working
life, and they started coming across all
these difficult challenges, they decided
that they need to work together as a
community to solve those challenges.
So, you’ll get an Amazon developer
talking to a Google developer because
1) they don’t really care about the
competitive advantages over the
‘What we created with
oneNDA was a crowdsourced
project with a
load of lawyers from
all over the world
who wanted to create
something that was
going to benefit.’
other, or vice versa, they just want to
solve the problem. There is this focus
on the greater good of how to solve
these difficult things that other people
haven’t been able to solve. I think
lawyers take a different approach, in
fact the opposite, we hoard knowledge
and we hoard information because we
are capitalising on it. In order for us to
really see progress in our profession
we have to open the barriers and
we have to collaborate. oneNDA is a
great example of how we can create
something really transformative that
can absolutely change the way we
do something as simple but as time
consuming as NDAs, because we all
collaborated for that greater good.
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