Photo credit: Library of Congress

Today we released what will hopefully be the first of many employment contracts on LexPublica. Why “many”? Because provinces and states have laws and regulations that affect how an employment contract in that particular jurisdiction needs to be written. Additionally, contracts could be customized for certain industries, positions, etc. The contract we released today is for British Columbia.

We started with BC because that’s where we’re located and it’s the jurisdiction Martin knows best. In the next couple of weeks we’ll release a generic Canadian employment agreement that can serve as a starting point for localization to other provinces and territories. When we do that, we hope Canadian employment lawyers will jump in to help localize versions for their jurisdiction.

If you’re such a lawyer, drop us a line or leave a comment and we’ll let you know when the generic text is ready. Better yet, sign up for the contributor newsletter so you’ll be the first to know about big projects like this.

Also, if you’re an American employment lawyer and you’d like to help us develop a generic U.S. employment contract template others could use to localize for different states, let us know.

This is our first big project, and we’re looking forward to working with all sorts of new people. If you know an employment lawyer, please point them this way.

Yesterday morning I went on CBC Radio’s Early Edition with Rick Cluff for a conversation about LexPublica.

As always happens, I left the interview thinking about some points I wish I’d mentioned. Here’s a clip of the conversation (provided by CBC) and here are the top points I would add:

1. In essence, LexPublica is similar to Wikipedia for contracts and law. While our initial focus is on simple contracts for small businesses, our vision is to become the reference source for contracts and legal knowledge.
2. Millions of people already handle their own contracts and legal affairs without the benefit of any decent information on the topic. LexPublica isn’t a substitute for a lawyer. Rather, LexPublica fills a gap in legal help for small businesses who want to understand a contract issue and may choose to handle the contract themselves – or in some cases, may conclude that they do wish to retain a lawyer (for example, because a legal matter is more complex than they had anticipated).
3. In addition to providing users with background legal information for contracts, LexPublica provides other indicators that help non-lawyers assess whether to trust LexPublica and to decide whether a contract is right for them. For example, our community of lawyer and non-lawyer participants uses a structured process to create contracts, with that work being open and visible to the public. In addition, we will be providing a revision history of contracts, so users can see the evolution of a particular contract. We believe this open approach to contract creation offers valuable context in making a choice about the suitability of a contract.

Shh, by Kradlum

This week we’re focusing on preparing our first contract. It’s a confidentiality agreement, also known as a non-disclosure agreement or NDA. We’ve decided to call it the former, since confidentiality is at the heart of it and it covers important things other than disclosure, such as restrictions on use of confidential information. And it’s a good first agreement for us to publish because it’s relatively straightforward and parts of it will likely find their way into other, more complex agreements we’ll work on down the line.

The first step we take in creating a new type of agreement is to work up a blueprint that covers the major considerations for all agreements of that type. The blueprint is a high-level outline that’s general enough to apply to all the confidentiality agreements our participants will produce, and specific enough to be a good first step toward developing the drafting instructions for a particular agreement. For example, the agreement we’re working on now is a simple mutual confidentiality agreement, and it’s likely that in the not-too-distant future we’ll also create a simple one-way confidentiality agreement. The blueprint outlines both, but the drafting instructions for each will be different, as necessitated by the different requirements of mutual versus one-way confidentiality.

We’ve posted the blueprint, which is very much a living document, and we’ll post the rest of our work as it progresses.

If you use, or anticipate someday needing to use, confidentiality agreements, what types of requirements do you commonly have? What situations have you encountered where you’ve needed a confidentiality agreement or have been asked to sign one? If this is something you’d prefer not to comment on publicly, you can email me. We’ll keep your comments in mind as we continue to flesh out the blueprint and plan future contracts.

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(Apologies to RSS subscribers for this duplicate post. Believe it or not, I accidentally deleted the original post and had to recreate it.)

When we first introduce people to the idea of LexPublica, a common assumption is that we’ll be like Wikipedia.

It’s not a bad assumption. Wikipedia has been phenomenally successful and we could do worse than to emulate them.

The challenge we’d face with trying to be like Wikipedia is that they use a “release, then review” content creation process.^[1]

The “release, then review” approach works well for content where the average reader can evaluate the quality of the article. For example: in a typical Wikipedia article, a reader has many ways to determine how much trust to place in the  information provided. Readers can check citations, cross-reference the information provided in the article with other sources, review the change history and discussions, and so on.

While it is relatively easy for the average person to verify a mundane encyclopedia article, most of us can’t verify legal information (or other specialized and complex knowledge like software or medical information). A consequence of this is that Wikipedia’s model is a poor fit for LexPublica. If we chose to release agreement templates before they were reviewed, we’d be inviting disaster for everyone who chose to use them.

In the Linux and open source software world, most projects fend off disaster by releasing only after review. In Linux’s example, multiple reviews are performed on code (and indirectly, contributors) before it is released to a large group of self-selecting testers for another review. Only after this chain of reviews is code released for general use.

LexPublica will be following a model much like Linux’s, with contributions being reviewed by trusted community members before they are released for general use. These reviews will be part of a larger process to create and improve content. In the coming posts, we’ll write more about this process and the tools that we’ll need to support it.

1. By “release, then review”, we mean that content is published and, over time, may be reviewed by readers and Wikipedia community members. This model is changed in some situations, such as when an article has a chronic vandalism issue. [↩]

In the months that we’ve been telling folks about LexPublica, we’ve heard a lot of different suggestions for the agreements that we should draft up for the alpha release in August. The most common requests for templates have been for:

• Consulting and service agreements
• Confidentiality/non-disclosure agreements
• Employment agreements
• Family agreements (such as pre-nuptial agreements and wills)
• Location and model releases
• Rights assignment agreements
• Website privacy policies and terms of service

If there is something on the list that you need but don’t see (or want to help draft), drop us a comment. We’re not going to promise that we’ll deliver any particular agreement, but the greater the interest in a given area, the more likely we’ll focus on it.

On July 7th, 2009 (which is today, as this post is being written) we’ll be delivering a 30 second pitch to a small crowd at DemoCamp Vancouver. If we successfully woo the assembled collection of bloggers, startup junkies and technologists, we’ll win one of the six-minute presentation slots in which we can elaborate.

Update: We did win one of the presentation slots, giving our little presentation to about 120 people.

The draft script for our 30-second pitch is:

Who here can afford a lawyer?

(Waiting for hands to lift and presuming that it won’t be many. Update: About 4 people from the crowd of 120  tentatively lifted their hands.)

That’s an indication of a really serious problem. No one can afford lawyers. Not individuals, not professionals, not small businesses. Not even lawyers can afford lawyers.

LexPublica is here to solve that problem.

Vote for us and we’ll tell you how we’re going to open source the law, save the world and make money at the same time.

The draft script for our six-minute presentation is:

Hi! I’m Martin, and I’m a lawyer.

and I’m Zak. I’m not a lawyer.

We’re both from LexPublica, a project to open source the law, save the world and make a bunch of money.

The law is a huge topic. A search for the word “legal” on Google returns about 790,000,000 results. To put that in perspective, a search for sex returns about 750,000,000 results. Our obsession with legal matters now seems to have outstripped our obsession with sex.

This is a reflection of the crying need for access to legal help. 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 can’t afford lawyers. Even lawyers complain, in all earnestness, that they can’t afford lawyers.

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

The first practical step we’ll take is to make common contracts available free of charge. These will include things that most of us need, such as employment agreements, website development agreements and non-disclosure agreements (NDA’s for short). The contracts will be written in plain English and have supporting guides to help you use them properly.

Along with the contracts, 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 do prepare a contract yourself and when you want to get a lawyer.

Take a non-disclosure agreement as an example.

When you get an NDA sent to you, and you’re uncomfortable signing it (because it looks one-sided), you’ll be able to come to LexPublica and get background info on typical provisions in NDA’s and what they mean.

LexPublica will give you the understanding to go back to the other party and negotiate better wording for the NDA (or send them a copy of LexPublica’s standard NDA).

If instead you’re the one who needs to send the NDA, you’ll be able to come to the LexPublica website to get that. You can choose a simple NDA for simple deals and a more detailed NDA’s for more complex deals. A guide to NDAs will help you what is appropriate.

No more one-sided contracts.  No more being at the mercy of someone else’s contract because you can’t afford a lawyer.

With LexPublica, you’ll have the benefit of open source law, putting control of your legal life back in your hands.

Tackling an enterprise of this magnitude requires a team bigger than just the two of us. LexPublica will need to be a global online community of lawyers and non-lawyers working together to create a global legal commons.

Wikipedia, Linux and other similar projects provide successful and similarly size examples for us to follow.

So far, we’ve told you about LexPublica, and how we’re giving stuff away for free.

What we haven’t yet told you yet is how we’re going to make money.

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

For 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.

So if you’re the person in your company who deals with contracts and the paperwork that goes along with it, you’ll be able to do that faster and more efficiently.  Instead of emailing versions of contracts in Microsoft Word back and forth with your customers (and with you lawyer too, if you’re using lawyer), and losing track of who’s got the most up-to-date version and who made what changes, you’ll have the online workspace  – again like Basecamp – to manage that process and to manage the evolving versions with proper change tracking. You can get the deal done faster, with less headache.

Intrigued? We hope so.

We’d like you to help LexPublica in two ways:

1. Tell us your problems with contracts and getting legal help.
2. Spread the word about our blog.

You can catch us here tonight, or drop us by email.

You can also keep up to date with our blog, and watch for our alpha release at the end of August.

In Light Your Taper, we talked about freely sharing our ideas and plans. Beyond writing publicly about them, there’s another important component to sharing freely: letting others use and build on your work.

Applying these principles to our blog, we’ve chosen to license our writings under the Creative Commons Attribution License. In essence, the licence means anyone can use our blog content for any purpose — commercial or non-commercial — so long as they give us credit.

This choice of a very permissive licence helps us share what LexPublica is working on, as widely as possible. Spreading the word about LexPublica is valuable to us, increasing our visibility and helping us find collaborators. The permissive licensing is also intended to enable others to leverage this content, adapt to their own purposes, and re-publish it.

In a future post, we’ll write about our thinking on the choice of licensing for LexPublica’s free contract templates and free information on how to use those templates. Quick preview: we’re inclined to use the same Creative Commons Attribution License. We’d love to hear from you if you have any views or comments on that.