Sort incoming NDAs before counsel sees them
An agent that pre-screens every NDA that reaches the sales inbox against the company's own NDA playbook, sorts it GREEN, YELLOW or RED with the clause behind each flag, pulls the counterparty's earlier agreements from SharePoint, and routes it for signature, a reviewer or counsel, with Anthropic's Legal plugin in Claude Cowork
The problem
Every new supplier, partner or prospect sends an NDA before the real conversation starts, and most are fine, but the few with a hidden non-compete, a perpetual term or an IP grant look exactly like the rest. Without a lawyer on staff the owner either signs without reading closely or lets the deal wait days for an outside review of a routine document.
How the agent works
It starts
The triage-nda skill in Anthropic's Legal plugin for Claude Cowork runs when a new NDA arrives as an uploaded PDF or Word file, a link to the document, or pasted text; through the plugin's Microsoft 365 connector the agent can also search Outlook for the thread and SharePoint for earlier agreements with the same counterparty.
The agent works
It reads the company's NDA rules from a local playbook file and, if none exists, uses market standard defaults and says so on the report. It checks ten areas (agreement structure, definition of confidential information, receiving party obligations, the five standard carveouts, permitted disclosures, term and survival, return or destruction, remedies, problem clauses such as non-solicits, non-competes, exclusivity, residuals and IP grants, and governing law) and marks each PASS, FLAG or FAIL. The result is GREEN (approve under standard delegation, typically the same day), YELLOW (minor issues a designated reviewer can fix in one pass, typically one to two business days) or RED (do not sign, counsel prepares a counterproposal, typically three to five business days), with the parties, term, governing law, the list of issues and a suggested fix for each. A person acts on every result: approves and routes GREEN for signature, sends the YELLOW flags to the reviewer, holds RED.
The result
The plugin states that its output is a screening aid to be checked by a qualified lawyer, and its defaults are US based, so the playbook must be adapted to the law where you operate.
Worked example
Anthropic's triage-nda skill ships with market standard defaults: a 2 to 3 year term (up to 5 years for trade secrets), confidentiality surviving 2 to 5 years after the end, 30 days to confirm an oral disclosure in writing, five standard carveouts, and certification of destruction accepted while a sworn affidavit is treated as onerous. In its own examples a 5 year term with 7 year survival is YELLOW; a one sided agreement where mutual was needed, a non-compete, liquidated damages, a term of 10 years or more without a trade secret reason, or commercial terms hidden inside a document called an NDA are all RED. The /vendor-check command in the same plugin reports the existing NDAs, MSAs and DPAs with a vendor and their expiry dates, which is the next question every NDA raises.
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