legislate Overview: Lawyer-approved contracts on no legal budget

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Last Updated on August 15, 2022

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Legislate Overview

Contracts and other legal documents are essential for establishing and growing a business. However, legal expertise is expensive and tracking legal contracts is difficult due to the unstructured nature of text based documents.

Not using a proper contract management process for creating or managing contracts costs businesses on average 9% of their annual revenue. The huge cost of poor contract management is a key reason why businesses should use contract management software. 

Legislate is a contract management platform which makes it easy for businesses to create and track lawyer-approved contracts on no legal budget using patented knowledge graph technology.

The Legislate company was founded in April 2020 by Charles Brecque and the team behind Legislate is based between Oxford, UK and Seville, Spain. The Legislate team is composed of a legal and software team.


Key features of legislate


Legislate provides a suite of lawyer-approved contracts which can be tailored to specific requirements by answering simple questions.

The answers to the questions are validated by the knowledge graph and are then used to generate a valid contract. The knowledge graph also makes the contractual terms hyper-searchable.

For example, employers can use Legislate to answer questions like how many employees are on a 30 day notice period? How many employees report to Jane smith? 

The data in the contracts is automatically aggregated to present key business metrics to users such as the time it takes contracts to complete and how many agreements are in a specific stage of the contracting lifecycle.

Legislate can also generate contract specific metrics such as the average NDA confidentiality term or total payroll for employment contracts.

These metrics are calculated in real-time so that business leaders can have more visibility of the data in their contracts.

Legislate can integrate with your favourite business apps using a Zapier integration. For example, contract managers can be notified in Slack or Teams when a contract is signed or before a contract is about to start or end.

Completed agreements can also be stored in a shared drive in Dropbox, Google or Microsoft using the same integration.

Legislate is also available as a public API which allows third party platforms to integrate dynamic contracts into their apps.

The aim is to make the data in contracts shareable via APIs to streamline the end-to-end contracting experience so that for example payroll and pensions can be set-up directly from Legislate.


Pros & cons of legislate


Legislate is a great tool for businesses of all sizes. Small businesses and early stage founders can get their legals in order from day one. Larger businesses can automate their compliance by offering continuous monitoring of the data in contracts.

Businesses can use Legislate’s contract templates or provide their own ones if they’ve been lawyer-approved. Once a contract has been added to the Legislate platform, the wording of the clauses are standardised and can’t be updated or reworded which is why the platform tends to be better suited to businesses which don’t have legal teams or businesses interested in streamlining their internal documents.

Alternative contract management platforms tend to optimise lawyers and unstructured data (pdfs and document editors). Legislate is building a tool which can be used by non-lawyers and makes contracts machine readable using knowledge graphs so that the data in contracts can be searched at scale. Knowledge graphs are a great way to store and navigate tangled and dynamic data just like the information stored in legal documents.


How to use the legislate?


Legislate is a SaaS platform which can be accessed from a web browser. Users don’t need contract templates to get started as the platform offers a suite of lawyer-approved templates which can be tailored to specific requirements.

Legislate is an end-to-end contracting platform which makes it easy to create a contract. Creating a contract requires completing 5 simple steps:

  1. Select the contract you’d like to create from a list of over 20 agreements
  2. Set the terms of the agreement by answering simple questions
  3. Add the parties of the agreement and invite them to review the contract by email
  4. Review the contract
  5. Sign the contract via e-signature

Legislate’s contract library grows every month and the goal is to offer all the agreements you need to grow your business.

Post-signature, reminders can be set using the Zapier integration and the signed contract can be uploaded to your favourite storage system using the same integration.

Searching a contract can be done by typing in the contract’s name or by using the advanced search functionality which filters contracts by their contractual terms.

The search filters are updated in real time so that you can only select filters which match the search criteria. Advanced search is an efficient way to accurately search your contracts.

To get started with Legislate, simply create an account and choose the right plan for your business.


FAQs about legislate


A common question which is often asked about Legislate is in which countries the contracts are valid. Legislate contracts are currently governed by the laws of England and Wales but the goal is to expand its applicability to other countries and jurisdictions including the US.

Another key question is about who can use Legislate. Legislate is easy and robust enough to use for non-lawyers but can be used by lawyers as well who are looking to reduce the time it takes them to generate simple agreements.

Finally, some users wonder if they can use Legislate to generate one-off templates which they can download and edit on their own. Whilst it is possible to purchase agreements and download them, doing so will potentially compromise the legal integrity of the agreement and lose all the benefits of using Legislate such as advanced search and data tracking.


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Rahul Choudhary is a technology and troubleshooting expert. He gives his expert opinion on different technology trends and provides troubleshooting guides for different apps, websites, & consumer hardware products. He graduated in BA English Honours from the University Of Delhi, and later he learned HTML and WordPress. He also did a certificate course in Hardware and Network Troubleshooting , and a certificate course in Computer Architecture.