How We Build Legal Templates
Every template on Forms Legal is statute-referenced, machine-validated, and traceable to a real git commit. No individual document has been reviewed by a practising lawyer. This page describes exactly what our pipeline does — and what it does not do.
The Build Pipeline
Each template moves through four stages before it reaches the site:
- 1
Statute Research
We identify the primary statute, regulations, and leading case law that govern each document type in its jurisdiction. References include section numbers, not just act names — for example, "Employment Act 1968, Cap. 91, s. 2" for Singapore or "Mietrechtsgesetz (MRG) § 14" for Austria. Research focuses on official government sources: legislation.gov.uk, Légifrance, Gesetze im Internet, eCFR, the relevant Commonwealth legal databases.
- 2
AI-Assisted Drafting
Templates are drafted using an AI-assisted pipeline guided by the statute research above. Draft output is constrained to the cited statutes: the pipeline is not permitted to invent clauses unsupported by the statutory framework for that jurisdiction. The result is a structured DocumentTemplateV2 object — field schema, clause text with {{fieldName}} markers, and metadata — that feeds the site's wizard and preview.
- 3
Automated Validation (validate-all.py)
Every template must pass our automated QA tool before it can be committed. The validator runs 20+ checks including: field name uniqueness, {{marker}} resolution (every marker has a matching field and vice versa), governing-law clause presence, signature block structure, statute-citation format (section number required), SEO metadata completeness (title, metaDescription, primaryStatute), and word-count floors for page content. Templates that fail any gate are flagged and corrected before the commit is allowed.
- 4
Provenance Tracking (doc-provenance.json)
Every published template's last-modified date is derived from the git history of its source file, not set manually. The date visible on a document page ("Template last modified: YYYY-MM-DD") is the real git commit timestamp of the most recent change to that file. This provenance record is rebuilt on every deploy, so a date can only advance when code changes — it cannot be fabricated forward.
What This Pipeline Does Not Do
No individual lawyer review
No practising lawyer has reviewed any individual template. Our templates are statute-referenced reference documents, not certified legal advice. The validation pipeline checks that citations are formally correct and that required clauses are present — it cannot substitute for professional legal judgment about a specific transaction.
reviewedBy not yet active
The codebase contains a gated reviewedBy feature that would display a named reviewer on each document. That feature is not currently activated: no templates have a human reviewer assigned, and we will not display reviewer attribution until genuine individual reviews are completed. The trust strip on each document page correctly reads "Maintained by Vladislav Sergienko, Founder" — not a legal-review claim.
Laws change faster than we update
Automated checks verify that each cited statute still resolves at its official source URL. They cannot detect that a statute was amended or repealed after our last update. We rely on reader reports and periodic re-research to catch these. If you find an outdated reference, the fastest correction path is the error-report link on the document page, or email below.
Reporting an Error
If you find an inaccuracy — an outdated statute, a missing required clause, a wrong jurisdiction — email [email protected]. Confirmed corrections are applied to the live site, re-run through validate-all.py, and logged with the exact git commit in our public Corrections Log.
Open for Inspection
The full template corpus, validation scripts, statute-linker, and this deploy pipeline are publicly available on GitHub. A machine-readable subset of the templates is also mirrored as an open dataset on Hugging Face under CC-BY-4.0. Anyone can audit how a template was built and when it was last changed.