NDA review in 30 minutes. Here's what's getting in the way.

NDA review takes longer than it should in most in-house teams. Not because lawyers are slow. Because the task contains more than it appears to.

An in-house lawyer put it plainly in a forum post:

"I spend 3-4 hours on NDA reviews that should take 30 min."

Why it takes three hours

Three structural problems explain most of that gap.

The first is the template. Every counterparty sends their own. Yours might be standard; theirs won't be. The deviation from your baseline isn't highlighted — it's in clause 2(b), worded to sound reasonable, only catching as a problem when you read it alongside clause 8. Finding it means reading everything.

The second is the playbook. Most in-house teams have NDA standards: what's acceptable, what needs escalation, what's a dealbreaker. But those standards often live in people's heads. Applying them to an unfamiliar document means remembering everything, digging through email for the last comparable deal, or asking a colleague who's equally busy.

The third is escalation context. Even once a deviation is found, the decision to push back depends on relationship history, what's been accepted before, how much this matters to the business. That context rarely lives in the document. It lives in someone's memory.

Then there's the output: a redline, a "clear to sign," something the business can act on. Another 20 minutes.

None of this is inefficiency. It's what the task actually requires.

200 NDAs a year, two hours longer than they should be: that's 400 hours. A quarter of one person's working year. Spent on work that could be templated.

What the fix looks like

The fix isn't to work faster. It's to remove the structural friction.

When a counterparty template comes in, Adeu reviews it against your playbook and flags deviations. Not every clause. Just the ones that differ from your standard, with your own fallback positions already loaded. The escalation context that usually lives in someone's head gets surfaced alongside the review: what you've accepted before with similar counterparties, what your standards say on that clause type. And the output — a redline, a summary, a clear recommendation — gets generated rather than drafted from scratch.

Standard NDA review in under 30 minutes, by anyone on the team. If your team is still spending hours on NDAs that should take half an hour, we'd like to show you the difference.