Designed and made in Canada · For two-sided contract negotiation
Built for the table, not for one side of it.
Every other product in this market belongs to the institution or to the union, which means it records one side of a shared event. Termsroom runs the whole negotiation between them, not just the redline: invite the other side, agree an agenda, table versions, compare them clause by clause, and keep a record either party can verify. Your documents stay in storage your own organisation owns; Termsroom holds the record, in Canada.
Written for public sector employers, government and mandate holders and unions. One side pays. The other side joins free and gets the same product.
Bargaining is the loud event. Grievances are the constant one.
Why it exists
Termsroom was designed after asking senior negotiators what they actually needed, and being told something the market had not built. They did not need software to negotiate. They are good at that, and it is their profession. What they wanted was software to facilitate the negotiation: to make the process auditable, easier to follow, and the same for both parties.
Everything available served either the institution or the union. A tool owned by one side records that side of a shared event, and the other side is asked to take its word for it. That is the gap this was built into, and it is why the two caucuses are separated by a database policy rather than by a screen, and why the record can be exported and verified by either party on its own machine with no connection to us.
It was built against a review of how rounds are actually conducted and recorded, and a scan of the current landscape from a governance and auditability standpoint. That scan is published with its sources, along with what the product does not yet do.
How a negotiation runs
Three acts, seven steps. Comparison is step five, not the whole product.
- Takes both sides
- One side does this
- Termsroom does this
Set the table
Steps 1 to 3- 1
Invite the other side. Takes both sides. Verified by a code they enter themselves, so a forwarded link never becomes an access grant.
- 2
Three rooms open. Termsroom does this. A sealed caucus for each party and one shared table, separated by the database rather than by the interface.
- 3
Agree what is being discussed. Takes both sides. An agenda adopted item by item, agreed only when both sides have said so.
Exchange
Steps 4 to 6- 4
Table a version. One side does this. From storage your own organisation owns. We record a pointer and a SHA-256. No copy is kept on our side.
- 5
See what changed. Termsroom does this. Every version compared clause by clause, each change classified substantive, cosmetic or structural.
- 6
Send it to the right people. One side does this. A matrix of who has and has not received each version, so nobody negotiates from one they were never sent.
Prove it
Step 7- 7
Keep the record. Termsroom does this. An append-only log, hash chained per organisation, that either side can export and verify on its own machine with no connection to us.
What you get, in four parts
Two sides, three rooms
A member of one party is not a member of the other party’s caucus, so they cannot read the room, its membership, its documents or its discussion. That is one row-level security policy, not a permission screen somebody has to remember to set.
How the boundary is enforcedWhat moved, in a sentence
Clause 12.4 raises the liability cap from $2m to $5m. Not a redline you have to read, but an answer you can act on. Clause labels, positions and counts are held; the text of your clauses is not.
See it on a real contractWho has what
Distribution is recorded per recipient, including the people who have received nothing, and each recipient’s opening and acknowledgement is recorded against the version they were sent.
Where this mattersAn agenda, a session, a record
The parts that make it a bargaining tool rather than a file tool. An agenda both sides adopt, a session with attendance, and a record of what was tabled and agreed on the day.
Why this existsWhere the documents live
Neither side has to hand over their documents.
Agreements live in a SharePoint library or an S3 compatible bucket your own organisation owns, under your own keys. Termsroom holds pointers, hashes, clause structure and the audit trail. It reads a document into memory to compare it, writes any artefact back into your storage, and keeps nothing.
Connect a bucket with your own API keys and we do hold that key, encrypted in a vault. We say so per provider rather than making a blanket claim, because the blanket claim is true of SharePoint and not of a bucket you hand us keys to.
Three things Termsroom is not
- Not a law firm. The summaries and classifications are aids to review, not advice, and the authoritative text is always the document rather than our description of it.
- Not a signature tool. Termsroom takes a negotiation to the point of agreement. You sign wherever you sign today.
- Not a place your documents live. If Termsroom disappeared tomorrow, every agreement would still be in the storage its owner controls, because it never left.
More of the same kind of answer is on the questions page, including what is not built yet.