Two sides, one document, and no shared record

A collective agreement renewal, a services contract, a joint venture. Two organisations, two legal teams, a document that changes twenty times over four months. The tools in use are email, a shared drive, and a spreadsheet somebody keeps privately.

Each of those does one job well and none of them does this job. Email is a transport, not a record: it proves a message was sent, not that a particular version was the one in front of the other side on a particular day. A shared drive holds files but has no notion of two parties with different entitlements. A contract lifecycle system assumes one organisation with an approval chain, and treats the counterparty as an external address rather than as a party with its own private room and its own storage.

Version confusion. Somebody works from the wrong draft. It is discovered two rounds later, and the fix costs more than the original disagreement.

Time spent finding changes. A tabled version arrives and the first hour goes on establishing what actually moved, before anybody can think about whether it matters.

Disputed disclosure. One side believes something was shared. The other says it never arrived. Neither can prove it, because the evidence is somebody's inbox.

Records that do not survive people. The negotiator leaves. The file was in their mailbox and their personal drive. Two years later, at arbitration, nobody can produce what was agreed or when.

The obvious fix is a shared workspace both sides use. It fails on the point that matters most: neither side will put its private position, its fallback and its counsel's advice into a system the other side has any relationship with. A room that both parties can see into is not a caucus, and a negotiation without a caucus is not a negotiation.

The second failure is custody. Asking a university, a health authority or a union to hand its bargaining documents to a third party for the duration of a negotiation is a procurement conversation that takes longer than the negotiation. Public bodies in particular have retention schedules, freedom of information obligations and residency rules that a vendor storing their documents makes harder rather than easier.

Three rooms rather than one. Each party gets a sealed caucus it controls, and the two meet at a shared table. Neither side can see the other's caucus, who is in it, or that any particular person is in it. That rule is enforced in the database rather than in the screen, and a customer can run a query that proves it.

Documents stay in storage each party already owns. Termsroom validates that the location is an organisational tenant rather than somebody's personal drive, refuses personal accounts and records the refusal, and holds pointers and hashes rather than files. Your retention policy continues to apply because the documents never left it.

The record is append only and hash chained, so an entry that was edited or removed can be detected offline, by either party, without asking us.

An auditor, an arbitrator or an information officer asks the same three questions: what was exchanged, who could see it, and can you show that the record has not been altered.

Termsroom answers the first with a version register carrying a hash per version and a distribution register naming every recipient. It answers the second with room membership held over time, including when somebody was added and when their access ended. It answers the third with a hash chain anybody can verify.

Those answers are produced by the system rather than assembled afterwards by the person being asked, which is the difference between an audit that takes an afternoon and one that takes a fortnight.

Termsroom does not negotiate for you, does not tell you what to concede, and does not replace counsel. It does not hold SOC 2 certification today; the readiness work is under way and the position is stated on the trust page rather than implied.

It also holds one category of text you type: discussion written inside Termsroom. That is disclosed rather than glossed over, and it is purged on request. Documents are never held.