Frequently Asked Questions

LexPublica is a free service that provides templates and supporting guides for common business agreements, such as confidentiality agreements (also known as non-disclosure agreements or NDAs), employment agreements and consulting agreements. The templates and guides are created by an online community of lawyers and non-lawyers, and are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. You can read more on our About page.

We're not a law firm and we don't provide legal advice. If you need legal advice on your particular circumstances, you should consult a lawyer.

(Also, this isn't legal advice, but you might want to go say hello to those kids. Maybe bring them some pop and offer to ref their game. I bet they'll stop aiming at your gnomes.)

No catch. All our content — contract templates, supporting guides and legal information — is provided free of charge for anyone to use, according to the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

During our alpha release, we're focusing on developing contracts and information for small businesses that are comfortable using the 'Net. We're aiming to serve this community first for several reasons: small businesses struggle mightily to afford legal services, they're often eager to try new things, they're comfortable letting new businesses know what they think and communicating it online, they don't hesitate to ask for what they want, and small businesses of many sorts often require similar types of contracts.

Over time, we'll be expanding our focus to appeal to individuals and to other kinds of businesses, too.

Great question, with a simple answer: we don't have any contract templates available yet. We've just released an alpha version of LexPublica, which is intended to enable a group of initial participants to start creating contract templates, along with supporting guides and information. As the materials produced by the participants are released on LexPublica, you'll be able to see and access them.

Participants follow a structured workflow that begins with identifying the type of contract that will be created. Through several detailed steps, contributors determine what needs to be covered by the contract, they write and edit the contract, then after it's reviewed and approved, they publish the contract for all to use. Each participant fills one or more particular roles, such as managing editor, legal drafter, technical writer, or style editor. You can read a more detailed explanation of our process, complete with a snazzy flowchart.

Participants are the people collaborating to produce contracts and documents with LexPublica. They're lawyers, law students, legal experts, technical writers, editors, proofreaders, and keen laypeople. During our alpha release, we really only have a handful of participants. As LexPublica grows, though, we'll invite more and more participants to collaborate on more and more contracts until we're able to invite anyone and everyone to participate.

We see what you're implying, but that's not what our issues are about.

The issue manager is where participants keep track of tasks that need to be completed and problems that need to be solved. During our alpha release, most issues involve the creation of our first contracts, and problems and feature requests related to how the website works. If you aren’t a participant, you can view the issues but you can’t submit or change any issues. However, you can leave comments that are used as input for the issues.

There's a commercial twin to LexPublica, called 8.5×14 (named after legal-size paper). It will provide a wide range of commercial services, both for people and businesses who need legal services, and for the lawyers who serve them. These services will be built around LexPublica’s open content and open APIs.

As one example, imagine an online workspace to manage your business’s standard contract templates, your contract negotiations and your dealings with your lawyer. The service is simple contract management, something like the Basecamp project management web service, but for contracts and negotiations.

8.5×14 has other commercial services on the drawing board, and we’ll be talking about those as we develop them. Check out our blog and Twitter feed for updates.

8.5x14 refers to 8.5x14 Media Corp., the owner of LexPublica. 8.5x14 is the commercial entity that will provide revenue-generating services, while LexPublica will eventually be spun off into a separate, independent, not-for-profit entity.

Ask friends, family members and work colleagues for recommendations. You can also contact your local state or provincial bar association for suggestions.

In time, 8.5x14 (the commercial twin to LexPublica) will provide an online marketplace to help you find the "right" lawyer — but that's a little ways off for now.

To our delight and surprise, most of the lawyers we've spoken with have been enthusiastic about LexPublica. They recognize that individuals and small businesses often struggle to afford legal services and they see the potential of LexPublica to help solve this problem. They also see the possibilities for community-developed legal materials. That said, some lawyers who aren't very active on the Web are skeptical about or confused by what we're doing and how we're doing it. And of course, some lawyers feel somewhat threatened by the opening-up of the law, either for their business or for their professional identity.

LexPublica values lawyers and the services they provide: there's no substitute for the wisdom, expertise and judgment of lawyers, and no information service can replace that. There is, however, a need to make high-quality information about the law more accessible, and that's the need we aim to fulfill. It's simply taking lawyers back to their roots as the first open-source business: the law, consisting of legislation and case law, has always been openly accessible to everyone free of charge (in fact, the law is required to be 'open source' to give effect to the principle of the rule of law and its implications). For centuries, lawyers have provided their services based on the law being an open resource. LexPublica is expanding that open resource to include broader legal knowledge, including the knowledge that goes into creating contract templates.

As we're just beginning our first alpha release, we're not quite ready to open things up to new participants. In the not-too-distant future, though, we'll be looking for participants to contribute to the development of new agreements and supporting documents. Specifically, we'll be looking for lawyers, law students, non-lawyers who are fascinated by the law, technical writers, and editors. Of course, we'll also be looking for consumers who want to give us their honest feedback and suggestions.