Ryan Walker, co-founder and CEO of General Legal, published on GitHub a free library of startup legal templates under a CC0 license. He shared the link directly in his X post.
Walker said this can end a common practice: "Lots of founders copy and paste Stripe's privacy policy, or have Claude draft an MSA at 2 a.m. and then worry about getting sued."
12 documents, from an MSA to a privacy policy
The published documents total 12: an advisor agreement, mutual and one-way nondisclosure agreements (NDAs), a master services agreement (MSA), a California employee offer letter, US and GDPR versions of a privacy policy, a data processing addendum (DPA), terms of service, a cookie notice, and a business associate agreement (BAA).
They're designed for technology companies that distribute software, integrate with outside systems, and provide ongoing platform services.
CC0 license: use as is, no attribution
All documents are released under the CC0 1.0 license, so anyone can freely use, modify, and distribute them without attribution. They come in both Markdown (optimized for LLMs) and original .docx files, so they can be used right away for AI agents to read and fill in the documents.
The highlighted parts in each document are fields the user fills in, such as company name, term, and amounts. Outside the US, the governing-law and jurisdiction clauses need to be adjusted separately to fit local law.
Designed by the lawyer behind Casetext
Walker was chief technology officer at legal tech company Casetext, where he built the AI legal research tool CoCounsel, and after Casetext was acquired by Thomson Reuters, he went through Y Combinator and co-founded General Legal. Because it was designed by a team with practicing-lawyer backgrounds, its clause structure is more trustworthy than generic template sites.