You Sell Software. So Why Are You Buried in Other People’s Contracts?
A software company signs the same five contracts over and over, and most of them arrive on the customer’s paper. That is where the hours go, and where the risk hides.
I spend a lot of my time talking with software companies about how they handle contracts, and the same thing comes up every time. A company builds a product, hires a small legal or operations team to protect it, and then that team spends most of its week reading contracts the company did not write.
It is worth saying plainly, because it surprises people outside the legal function. A software business does not sign a thousand different agreements. It signs the same five, over and over: the SaaS subscription, the software license, the data processing agreement, the services agreement, and the mutual NDA. Those five carry the revenue and the risk of the whole company. And a growing share of them, nearly all of the enterprise ones, come back on the buyer’s paper.
The risk is in the incoming paper, not your own
You know your own templates cold. That is not the problem. The problem is the version a customer sends back, or the master agreement a big buyer insists on using instead of yours. “Great, we love to buy it. Here’s our paperwork.” A contracts lead at one software company described exactly that to me: his team keeps its own MSA open on one side of the screen and the customer’s on the other, working through the differences, and he called inbound third-party paper the single best use of an AI review.
When you draft, you set the positions. When you review, you are hunting for the places the other side moved them. A customer’s MSA leaves your liability uncapped, or strikes the consequential-damages exclusion. A data processing agreement commits you to security obligations you cannot actually meet at scale, or blocks the subprocessors you depend on. A services agreement quietly claims your deliverables. An NDA shows up with a non-compete tucked inside it. None of that is exotic. For a software business it is the same short list of terms, on the same five agreements, deal after deal.
Why review is the bottleneck
Software companies rarely struggle to write these contracts. They struggle to review the ones that come back, at the speed deals arrive, and to review them the same way every time.
This is not only my read. In a 2026 benchmark study, 55% of business professionals said a legal or contract delay had caused a deal to slip or be lost in the past year, and among software and technology companies that figure rose to 85%, the highest of any industry. Meanwhile, the fully loaded cost of processing even a basic, low-risk contract, once you count every function’s hours, has been estimated at roughly $6,900.[1] The review is not a formality. It is a deal-timer and a cost center at once.
Speed is the visible cost. A first-pass review of a third-party agreement runs 60 to 90 minutes, and every hour a customer’s order form sits in a queue is an hour a signed deal waits behind it. Consistency is the quiet cost. Without a shared standard, two people give two different answers on a liability cap or a data-use right, and a renewal notice window slips past unnoticed until you are locked in for another year. And it does not scale: volume climbs with revenue while the team, often a team of one, stays the same size.
I don’t think any of that reflects badly on the people doing the work. It is what happens when a specialized, high-stakes task lands on a lean team under a deal clock, and the only tool is a careful read.
A first-pass reviewer for the paper you receive
This is the part software is actually good at. ReviewPro reads an incoming SaaS agreement, EULA, DPA, services agreement, or NDA against your own positions, in minutes, inside Word. It redlines the terms that fall outside your lines and flags the ones that need a person’s judgment: an uncapped liability clause, a data-use restriction that would hamstring the product, a forced assignment of your IP.
It closes the gap on all three fronts at once. It scales, so every inbound contract gets the same pass, not only the ones somebody had time to worry about. It carries the positions in a playbook, so the reviewer does not have to be a software-contracts specialist to catch a software-contracts problem. And it is fast and consistent, the same standard on every deal. It is a first pass, not a legal opinion, and that is the point. Not every contract needs a lawyer, and the ones that do reach the lawyer with the routine work already done and the real issues already flagged.
Where to start
Pick the inbound contract that clogs your pipeline most often. For most software companies that is the customer MSA or the NDA. Write down the positions you already take, turn them into a playbook, run the next batch of incoming paper through a first pass, and measure the time your team gets back.
Your customers are not going to stop sending their own paper. That part is not going to change. How long it takes you to review it, and whether every deal gets the same careful eye, is the part you can. When the risky terms get caught early, everyone comes out ahead: the deal closes faster, the team feels bigger than it is, and the contract you sign is one you can actually live with.
See how ReviewPro reviews inbound customer paper for software companies →
Notes
- Streamline AI, The True Business Cost of Legal Friction (2026), a survey of 467 business professionals across sales, HR, marketing, product, finance, and compliance: 55% reported a legal delay causing a deal to slip or be lost in the past 12 months, rising to 85% among software and SaaS respondents. Separately, the International Association for Contract & Commercial Management (IACCM, now World Commerce & Contracting) estimated the average cost of processing a basic, low-risk contract at roughly $6,900 in its 2017 Cost of a Contract study of 700+ large organizations. ↩
ReviewPro is not legal advice. Confirm your positions with your counsel and your organization’s contracting policies.