Explaining Virtual Collaboration Network - Delivering Live Contract Negotiation at Scale

Today we launched the Docgility Virtual Collaboration Network (VCN)—a complex product that solves fundamental problems in contract negotiation. This post explains the technology and the problems addressed.

The Core Value Proposition

VCN enables live, multi-party, multi-company contract negotiations. Docgility VCN eliminates the time-consuming processes that plague traditional contracting: document ping-pong, version control chaos, and slow workflow processes.

The Business Problems We're Solving

Contracts Execute Too Slowly - Contract negotiations often take six months or more to complete. The primary culprit? Documents literally passed from person to person as Word files or PDFs, creating change management nightmares.  With CLM systems, coordinating with external parties—suppliers, counterparties, outside legal counsel—still requires sending documents back and forth. Complex and slow workflows cannot bridge organizational boundaries.  With Docgility, multiple parties across multiple companies can collaborate and negotiate concurrently in a live environment, dramatically reducing contract cycle times.

No Standard for Multi-Company Collaboration - There's no recognized standard for how companies interact during contract negotiations. The only common denominator is Microsoft Word and track changes—hardly a modern solution.  Docgility delivers a peer-to-peer negotiation API that facilitates multi-party, multi-company live negotiations.

Alternatives like War Rooms Are Administrative Nightmares - Organizations create secure "war rooms" where multiple parties can access documents with controlled permissions. The problems are significant:

• Requires IT setup for every single contract (not scalable)

• Creates massive administrative overhead (not easy to maintain)

• Nobody uploads sensitive documents (like playbooks) to shared environments (not secure)

• Limits the ability to leverage intelligent systems during negotiations (not intelligent)

VCN’s Key Technologies

Multi-Organization Architecture - VCN extends document concurrency beyond organizational boundaries, allowing multiple external companies to share, collaborate, and negotiate contracts simultaneously.

Document Concurrency - Docgility pioneered document concurrency in contract management—the ability for multiple parties to access and modify the same document at the same time. Similar to Google Docs but designed specifically for contract negotiations with proper security and role-based permissions.

Decentralized Routing Architecture - Unlike centralized war room approaches, each company connects to VCN separately through secure links. Contract messages flow through VCN to enable collaboration and negotiation, with messages not persisted by VCN, ensuring security of communications. This maintains neutrality and ensures security for all parties—no central repository means no security vulnerability.

Peer-to-Peer Negotiation API - Instead of storing everything centrally, our peer-to-peer API enables each party to maintain their own datasets—playbooks, templates, AI agents—while still interacting with documents shared through VCN. You keep your intelligence proprietary while collaborating and negotiating on live documents.

Atomic Sentence-Level Changes - Docgility manage changes at the sentence level, not at the word level. When a party approves a change, they're approving a complete thought expressed in a full sentence, not fragmented word-by-word edits. This ensures clarity and reduces approval confusion.

Massive Scalability - VCN's infrastructure is designed for large volumes of concurrent API calls, capable of scaling to thousands of companies connected to the same VCN network simultaneously.

This makes VCN suitable for applications that may require large number of digitally interconnected companies, such as:

• Large supply chain integrations (provide a VCN to manage all supplier relationships to streamline contract negotiations across the entire supply chain)

• Industry consortiums and groups (host a VCN for industry consortiums specific to type of goods or vertical)

• Enterprise-wide vendor and procurement relationships (manage a VCN to digitally connect to procurement suppliers)

• Streamlined outside counsel coordination (use a VCN to coordinate across all external law firms)

Understanding Live Negotiations

Live Sessions - Docgility is the first to deliver live multi-party, multi-company contract negotiations.. A VCN live session enables all parties to interact with contracts concurrently—negotiation becomes a live concurrent process rather than a sequential one (like in a traditional workflow-based process with documents sent between systems).

The session continues until all parties submit their changes and approve the final version. After all changes are negotiated and approved, the final contract can then be sent for signatures and final execution.

Collaboration vs. Negotiation - These are distinct processes that need separation:

• Collaboration: Internal stakeholders and agents (including external collaborators like outside counsel) submit change recommendations for the document owner's approval.

• Negotiation: Counterparties and their agents suggest and react to changes

Docgility maintain a firewall between these processes to ensure that counter parties do not see the internal collaboration comments and changes.  Collaboration messages stay internal until changes are approved and presented to counterparties.

Managing Processes Separately - Collaboration and Negotiation processes can be managed separately.  For example, you may not want to provide counter party access until Collaboration with internal stakeholders is completed.  You can then start and stop processes separately:

• Start collaboration to collect internal feedback

• Stop collaboration and create a clean version

• Open negotiation with counterparties

Document Checkpoints - Sometimes you need to checkpoint progress and hide older changes. The "Create Clean Version" function incorporates all approved changes into a new document baseline that can then be used for subsequent processes. This prevents change fatigue and keeps negotiations focused on current issues.

VCN Administration - VCN administration primarily handles security access and authentication for companies connecting to the network. The VCN can be administered:

• Privately (for all relationships specific to your company)

• By a neutral third party (like an independent audited firm)

Once companies are authenticated, parties can be added as collaborators or negotiators to contracts simply by email address.

Email-Based Trust Authentication - VCN relies on participating companies to authenticate their users' email addresses. Participation requires a trust relationship ensuring that companies verify their parties' authenticity.

This is typically accomplished through Single Sign-On (SSO) technology implemented at each company, ensuring that only authenticated users can access VCN documents.

Adoption Takes Time

Any transformative technology requires rethinking accepted practices. Since live contract negotiations represent a fundamentally new approach, we recognize there are cultural barriers organizations will need to address for successful VCN adoption.

The Transparency Question - Live negotiations make the entire process visible to all participants in real-time. For many organizations, this transparency is a feature—it accelerates decision-making and eliminates information silos.

But transparency also challenges deeply ingrained practices. Legal professionals have long used information control as both a quality mechanism and a negotiation tool. Limited visibility can feel like strategic and tactical advantage.

The tradeoff is straightforward: opacity may feel strategically valuable, but it increases contract cycle times. Organizations need to decide which matters more—traditional negotiation tactics or dramatically faster contract cycle times.

Rethinking the Document Experience - Docgility deliberately constrains document formatting during negotiation. You can't adjust fonts, tweak styles, or refine layouts while negotiating terms.

This frustrates some users initially. Word's formatting capabilities feel like essential tools, and their absence feels limiting.  But consider what we're optimizing for: substantive legal review, not document production. During negotiation, does formatting advance the deal? Or does it distract from the terms that actually matter?

Final formatting happens before signature—polish the document when negotiation concludes. While terms are being discussed, all parties focus on the contract substance.

Incremental Adoption Works - Docgility works perfectly well without VCN. Use it internally first. Get your team comfortable with the platform and approach.  That's why Docgility functions as a complete standalone enterprise solution without requiring VCN.

Use Docgility for internal contract management and get comfortable with the platform. When you're ready to extend collaboration beyond your organization, VCN is there—enabling your environment to participate in live negotiations with other connected companies.  Transformation doesn't happen overnight, and it shouldn't. Adopt at the pace that makes sense for your organization.

The Path Forward

For the first time, the technology exists to make multi-company contract negotiation a live, collaborative process instead of a months-long document exchange. This isn't incremental improvement—it's a fundamental transformation.

The harder question isn't technical—it's cultural. Contract and legal professionals need time to trust new approaches for high-stakes enterprise agreements. That's not resistance; that's prudence.

We don't expect overnight transformation. Start with internal contracting using Docgility. Experiment with VCN on lower-stakes agreements. Expand as confidence grows and benefits become measurable.

Contracting's future is already here—live collaboration, real-time negotiation, and speed that seemed impossible just years ago.