Most businesses need the same legal contracts repeatedly. Instead of paying to draft the same agreements repeatedly, industry groups, companies and law firms have made many free, high quality templates available online. Great examples include the NVCA’s venture financing papers, ACAS’s employment templates and CommonPaper’s commercial agreements.
At GitLaw we’ve started a project to index the best templates from around the world so that they become easier to find and use.
We believe these standards are not just useful to the 90% of small businesses that can’t afford legal advice, but ultimately to businesses of any size.
These market standards speed up agreement
Most of these templates have been designed to be a fair middleground or even market-standard, and have been shaped by input from both sides of the table.
In most business deals both parties are happy to do business on market standard terms - so by using these terms - they can come to agreement faster. That inevitably results in significant savings on saving and often on legal fees. The faster the contract is signed, the sooner the real work (where the value is) can begin. While negotiating a minor clause might feel like a person win for the lawyer on the case - slowing down the deal by a week is often commercially more costly than any potential contractual win.
AI can easily implement the templates
Organisations have been releasing templates for free for some time but knowing which template to use or how to adapt it has often been too complex for wide appeal.
With frontier AI models, we’re excited to create an experience where AI can allow users to create contracts using these templates in a workflow that feels seamless - where they can write or speak in natural language and the contracts are simply created.
Help us expand templates in our directory
If you are an author of a legal template that you think we should include in our directory or you’d like to contribute to existing templates, we’d love to hear from you.
