The agreement that clogged the legal queue now closes without a lawyer touching it.

The challenge

Every technology or ecommerce company that wants to partner with FedEx goes through a contracting process involving the prospective partner, the leaders of the Compatible program, and legal representatives on both sides. FedEx negotiates thousands of agreements with partners and vendors every year, and the large majority of those negotiations start where most partnerships start: the mutual non-disclosure agreement.

The legal department was inundated with redlines to MNDAs. In-house attorneys were spending a disproportionate share of their time on relatively innocuous agreements, and the review queue backed up behind them. FedEx wanted to eliminate unnecessary redlining by making the MNDA easier to accept as written, so the legal team could turn to agreements where their judgment actually mattered.

The delay compounded. Because approval was long and tedious, FedEx directors and executives were also spending time reviewing and approving boilerplate. And the process needed to live somewhere it could be documented and timestamped for future partner negotiations. Removing the need to approve a standard agreement was the fastest way to give that time back.

The solution

We ran design workshops with FedEx Compatible’s leaders to identify the real constraint and to shape a solution that would let them:

• Send clickwrap agreements from inside Salesforce to capture partner consent
• Streamline the internal approval path
• Convert other agreement types to clickwrap format where appropriate, without writing code or configuring new approval processes

We then built a Lightning Web Application to manage the setup, sending, and tracking of clickwrap agreements. Using DocuSign’s Click service as the cornerstone, we developed Lightning Web Components that let a channel manager or account executive initiate a new clickwrap MNDA and move it through the right approval channels.

New agreement types are set up as templates in Salesforce, as are their approval processes, without involving a Salesforce administrator. The business administers its own clickwrap agreements, which is what opened the door to offering more agreement types digitally.

Because the whole process runs on DocuSign’s legally compliant digital signature offering, the agreements are binding and the transaction data is auditable — a requirement for compliance with program guidelines and regulation, not a nice-to-have.

How the flow works

1. A contract types object home page holds the reusable agreement templates.
2. Once a template is confirmed, the contract request is ready to send for approval by the Compatible manager and director.
3. The manager or director approves, and the clickwrap goes to the prospective provider.
4. The recipient receives an email from FedEx asking them to accept the clickwrap agreement.
5. The agreement is merged and displayed to the provider when they follow the link.
6. Once signed, the clickwrap agreement ID is written back onto the contract request record in Salesforce.

The results

Roughly one in five agreements sent out by the FedEx Compatible Solutions Program each year is a mutual NDA. Those agreements clogged pipelines and to-do lists and stalled progress on far more consequential contracts.

FedEx Compatible projects that the new capability will virtually eliminate the need for attorneys to review MNDAs at all, freeing hundreds of hours of attorney time for the complex negotiations that warrant it. The business can now add new agreement types on its own, which means the next bottleneck of this kind does not require another project to fix.