FAQs

Why are you making the documents available free of charge?

The ethos behind open source software is simple. People (and companies) provide their time and effort to set up a software development project and release it for free. Other people find it useful, use it, and improve it. If they feed back the improvements to the original project, so the software is improved for everyone. This form of software development has been going on for over 30 years, and it works. All the big software companies, like Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Apple and Google, are heavily involved and invested in open source. Think of it as a really, really simple way to pool research and development. Companies won’t use it for the things that make them unique or stand out in the market. But no one ever bought some shoes (for example) from an online store because that store used a particular database to manage its inventory, so important software, like databases, are frequently available as open source projects. In the same way, no one ever chose a particular law firm because hey! They have a great bank of templates!

You can, of course, use open source software for free, in which case you have no comeback if it doesn’t work properly, but you do trust that, if it’s a successful project, many person-days of work have gone into developing it and debugging it. On the other hand,  if you want support and a warranty, then you can pay for it. Companies like Red Hat and Tidelift thrive on this model: the underlying software is available free of charge, but you can pay a services company if you want service and support (and warranty backup). To many people using software from companies like Red Hat, they don’t really care that it’s open source. All they want is software that works, is well-supported, and, if something goes terribly wrong, they have a company that they claim against. And there’s nothing wrong with any of that.

We believe the same dynamic could and should apply to legal drafting. As we said, no one ever chose a law firm because they have access to great template documents, so there’s no reason, other than conservatism, why law firms shouldn’t adopt this model. If people want customisation and support of the document templates, then they can engage a law firm. They may not even know that the template documents are free and open source.

So here we have a selection of document templates you can use, free of charge. Like open source software, if you use these templates, or rely on our faqs and advice notes, and get something wrong, then you have no recourse to us, because you haven’t paid for them. It’s always a good idea to use your own lawyers, or any of the lawyers listed here, to check that the template is used properly and works for your purposes and business. And if you do find something here that can be improved, please participate in the process for improving them, on our sister site, git.law.

Why are you making the documents available free of charge?

Yes (although the extent of that coverage varies from country to country). One of the challenges in preparing a set of documents like this is that our lawyers can’t simply do what they normally do – take an existing document template – and modify it. Those document templates are likely to be subject to a licence which only lets you use them for a specific transaction, not to make them generally available to everyone, so our lawyers had to start drafting the document from scratch.

We’re a law firm. Can I incorporate these documents into our own precedent bank?

Of course. The only thing you have to do is to retain our copyright notices and attributions. See https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ for more details.

Aha! I think you’ve missed something. That licence you use, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/, lets us take all your work, and even sell it ourselves!

Yep.  That’s by design. We want to make the documents as widely available as possible. Of course, your customers will see our copyright and attribution notices, and wonder why they are paying for something they can easily get for free. So unless you are adding value, they might get a little disgruntled.

So if we improve your documents, we have no obligation to make those improvements available to anyone else, or give them back to you?

No. Although if you do end up with your own separate bank based on ours, you’ll find that we improve and expand the documents over time, you’ll have an increasingly big job reintegrating the improvements we have made with your bank (this is called “forking, by the way”), so in the end, you’re better off submitting your improvements back to us, so we can incorporate them, and everyone is using the latest versions of the documents.

How are the documents free to use?

All the contract and legal documents and on this site are available under a Creative Commons Attribution Licence. That means you can download them, copy them, modify them and translate them, all without any additional permission from us. The only requirement is that, if you do use them or re-distribute them, you retain the attribution and copyright notice:

How will you make money from this?

Although anyone can take the documents and use them free of charge, our sister company Moorcrofts LLP Moorcrofts.com is a law firm which makes money by selling legal services, so we hope that people will want to pay us to tailor the documents to their specific needs. Of course, if they do pay us, they not only benefit from tailored documents, but also they will be covered by the Moorcrofts LLP indemnity insurance and professional liability standards if we get it wrong.

How can I contribute to the FROSDOT documents?

You can create an account at git.law, and contribute there. If you have specific issues, you can also use the issue tracker on git.law.

We are always looking to expand the scope and depth of our document templates, so if you want to introduce more documents, translate or localise documents into your own language or country, please do so! However, like almost all open source projects, we do have some requirements before we accept code. Aside from (obviously) checking that the documents (or improvements etc.) are appropriate, and that they make sense from a legal perspective, we will ask you to complete our Apache-style contributor license agreement.

How can I contribute to the FROSDOT code?

You can create an account at git.law, and contribute there. If you have specific issues, you can also use the issue tracker on git.law.

We are always looking to expand the scope and depth of code offerings, so if you want to introduce more documents, translate or localise documents into your own language or country, please do so! However, like almost all open source projects, we do have some requirements before we accept any code. Aside from (obviously) checking that it does what we want, and works properly, we will ask you to complete our Apache-style contributor license agreement.