About LexPublica

No one can afford lawyers. Individuals, professionals and small businesses can’t afford lawyers. Startups can’t afford lawyers. Big companies with large budgets for legal services struggle to afford lawyers. Even lawyers complain, genuinely, that they can’t afford lawyers.

LexPublica aims to solve this problem by opening up the world of legal knowledge to everyone.

The first step we’re taking is to make common contract templates available free of charge. A community of volunteers collaborates to create the contracts, which include agreements that many businesses need, such as employment agreements, website development agreements and confidentiality agreements (also known as non-disclosure agreements or NDAs). The contract templates are written in plain language and have supporting guides to help you use them properly.

Along with the contract templates, we’ll provide other information about contracts and the law to help you make informed decisions. With that, you can also make a better decision about when you want to prepare a contract yourself and when you want to consult a lawyer.

In short, LexPublica puts control of your legal life back in your hands.

Online community to create global legal commons

Tackling an enterprise of this magnitude requires an enormous team effort. LexPublica needs to be a global online community of lawyers and non-lawyers working together to create contract templates and informational guides for those templates.

Our grand vision is to harness this community effort to create the reference source for contract templates and for practical legal information, and beyond that, for all legal knowledge across all areas of law. You might call it a global legal commons.

Think we're crazy? Wikipedia, Linux and other similar projects provide successful and similarly sized examples for us to follow.

Yes, we have a real business too

There’s a commercial twin to LexPublica called 8.5x14 Media Corp. (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. We're currently focused entirely on launching LexPublica, but we'll keep you posted as we begin to develop our commercial services.

Open approach

We’ll be using best practices for collaborative online platforms and content, like open APIs, open formats, open standards and Creative Commons licensing.