Draft Legal Templates

If you're selling into more than one state, this is worth knowing before anything else. There's no single national contract law in the US. How a contract is formed, how it gets read, and what you can recover if it goes wrong are all questions of state law. The same agreement can behave differently in Texas than it does in New York.

Federal law still applies, though in narrower areas than most people assume. Minimum wage and overtime, discrimination protections, and sector rules for industries like healthcare and financial services. Treat it as a baseline everyone meets rather than a source of your commercial terms.

So when someone asks whether a document works in the US, that question is missing a step. What you want to know is which state's law applies and whether your key clauses hold up under it.

The governing law clause names the state whose rules will be used to read the agreement. It's usually one line. It quietly sets how every other clause you negotiated gets interpreted.

Pick a state with a real connection to the deal. Where one of you is based, or where the work happens. A choice that looks arbitrary invites pushback in redlines and slows the deal down for no benefit.

Governing law and where any disagreement gets resolved are two separate choices. The second usually sits in a forum or venue clause. They're often the same state. Settling one doesn't settle the other, so check your contract answers both before it goes out.

Most of a well-drafted commercial agreement moves from state to state without trouble. A short list doesn't. Those are the ones to look at once you've set your governing law.

Non-competes vary enormously. Some states enforce a restriction that's reasonable in scope and length. Others keep them on a tight leash. Some won't enforce them against most employees at all. A clause your last company used without a second thought can be worth nothing in the state you're hiring in now.

Employment terms are next, since most employment rules are set state by state. Notice, final pay timing, and what a written agreement does to at-will employment all shift depending on where you are. After that it's trade secrets and privacy obligations, including state privacy laws like the California Consumer Privacy Act.

Most of the exposure a commercial team carries doesn't come from the documents it writes. It comes from the ones it receives, where someone else made every drafting choice and the pressure is to sign and move on.

If you have ten minutes, spend them on four clauses. Indemnities, limitation of liability, termination rights, and assignment. They account for a disproportionate share of the problems and they're rarely where people look first.

Knowing what that type of document normally contains is what makes this fast. An unusual clause stands out immediately, and so does a missing one, which is harder to see and often costs more.

Not every agreement carries the same risk, and treating them as though they do is what makes contracting slow. Most commercial documents sit inside terms your business has already decided it's comfortable with. A few sit outside them.

The useful discipline is being able to tell those apart quickly and reliably. When the standard ones are recognisably standard, they can move. When something falls outside your normal terms, it gets the attention it actually warrants instead of competing for it.

That's where the commercial gain comes from. Not from reviewing everything faster, but from being confident enough about most of your agreements to spend your judgement on the ones that matter. Customers close 70% faster working this way.

Whoever writes the first draft sets the starting position on every term nobody argues about. In most deals that's nearly all of them. Negotiation concentrates on price, term, and one or two commercial points everyone cares about.

Everything else passes through roughly as written. That's how businesses end up carrying a risk position nobody chose, agreed in a clause nobody read.

Starting from a document drafted accurately for your jurisdiction means the terms you're not arguing about are still ones you'd stand behind. Consistency across every agreement is what turns that from luck into a position you can rely on.

Each template is a starting point GenieAI drafts around your situation rather than a static file you download and fill in by hand. You say who's involved and what the deal is. You get a document carrying the clauses that agreement usually needs.

From there you're editing rather than writing. Change terms, see what a counterparty altered in their redlines, and ask the document questions directly when a clause is doing something you didn't expect.

The library runs to 588 document types across contracts, policies, letters, deeds, notices, and forms, drafted to local governing law across 150+ jurisdictions.

The categories below are organized by what the document is. Agreements, policies, letters, notices, deeds, certificates, and forms. If you already know what it's called, that's your quickest route in.

If you know the kind of work but not the name of the document, the practice area pages group the same library by legal specialism, which tends to be easier to navigate.