Starter for GitForLaw
Source Format for Legal Documents
GitForLaw Model Taxonomy: Model Taxonomy
Most of legal is collaboration, voluntary collaboration in deal making or compelled collaboration in litigation. Most of law is done as documents.
Collaboratively sourcing legal documents could make the documents and the law radically faster, cheaper, clearer and better. Collaboratively sourced documents and their components permit quasi-codification of the documents, improving certainty, transparency and balance.
Managing document workflows in git could radically improve negotiation, performance and audits (including litigation, the “hard” form of auditing).
Legal documents are only the surface of the law, but they connect legal institutions, processes and theory to social and business reality. The law can be discerned through legal documents.
Legal documents and document sets can be collaboratively sourced in git. Git is the most efficient and scaled approach to managing text collaboration. It arose from the software coding community, where the requirements are more extreme than in law. We in law can stand lightly on those broad shoulders.
By “law” we mean legal documents. Legal documents of course include statutes and regulations, and there are some remarkably achievements using git for those. However, most of our focus will be on documents that people and businesses negotiate and sign. These are far more numerous and can be adopted more easily, by any two parties. Foremost are contracts, but all legal documents can be sourced using git, including permits, organizational documents, even litigation.
A second aspect of legal collaboration for which git is very useful is directly in negotiation as a deal room. A transaction is a kind of document “project” for which git has great functionality. A draft term sheet can be proposed, negotiations can be done as “pull requests,” and internal discussions on each side can be done by forking. The pyramid of collaboration can be as deep, nested and private as desired.
A third aspect of law where git is useful is teaching. Course materials can be published in git, assignments can be done as pull-requests even class discussion can be organized in git. Currently, some CS classes, even very large ones, are taught as git collaborations. Again, we in law have broad shoulders on which to stand.
There are multiple entry points of git for law.