Legal playbook
How the Legal Team makes a Startup lawful from its first day, wakes each legal floor row on its trigger, and keeps people only where the law names one.
Agents do a Startup's legal work from its first day, and a person acts only where the law names one. The Legal Team draws that line exactly, and every act on it reaches the right person with the work done.
Lawful before the first sale
A Startup has paper before it has a Customer. Publish terms runs the moment the Startup is created and generates its customer paper from the definition. It declares a Purpose for each use of personal data the Products make.
Launch refuses a Startup without published paper. The rule costs nothing to meet and closes the gap most new businesses leave open for months.
The same day, a Startup already sits inside a Company that can sell and sign for it. A Studio Startup sits in the Studio's holding Company; a self-serve founder connects their own. The entity covers both.
The floor wakes on triggers
The legal floor lists every obligation the law can put on a Startup, one row each. A row sleeps until its trigger fires. The first commercial email wakes CAN-SPAM; the first EU reader wakes Tracking.
Each woken row names the Process that meets it and the Role that signs. A Startup Template's page lists the rows it wakes, so a founder sees the obligations before choosing.
Screen an Offer applies the floor to every new Offer. It tags each Reserved Act the Offer performs, each class of regulated data it touches, and each Credential delivery requires. An Offer that needs a Credential the Startup cannot supply stays unpublished.
Who signs
Sales need no person. An Agent completes a checkout or accepts a click-through Agreement as an electronic agent inside its Mandate, and the contract binds the Company.
A natural person signs only the acts the law reserves to one: board votes, securities, sworn filings, identity checks, and insurance applications. For a Startup the Studio holds, the officer desk signs them in batches; for a self-serve Startup, the owner of record does.
Who signs gives the full table and how each signature binds to the exact text read.
Licensed review
A Reserved Act is a Verb the law reserves to the holder of a named Credential, such as filing a patent application for someone else. Its Function is always human, and no Setting hands it to an Agent.
Take a Startup that drafts provisional patent applications. When a fulfilled Order contains a filing, Attest work checks the Parties for conflicts, reads the practitioner's standing fresh, and presents the work.
The practitioner's Attestation performs the act under their Credential or declines it. A decline is final, and no platform rule overrides it.
Intake, drafting, scheduling, delivery, and billing stay automated, so the practitioner spends time only on the judgment the law requires.
Agents in public
Every Agent says it is an agent, in every Channel. A Message that recommends a sibling Startup says the two share an owner. An Agent that sends for a person does so only under that person's Mandate, and every Action records whom it was for.
The principal answers for its Agents, so a Limit is checked before every call. An act outside the Mandate becomes an Approval, never a contract. Agents and the law covers disclosure, delegation, and the provider and deployer roles.
Privacy and consent
A Consent is a grant for one Purpose, with its basis, region, notice version, and expiry. The Privacy Officer keeps one for every Contact and every Purpose the Startup uses.
An opt-out becomes a Suppression held by the Company and read before every send. An opt-out at one Startup binds every sibling within the hour, because one legal sender covers them all.
Privacy request finds every record about a Person across every System. It exports, corrects, or restricts those records and confirms before the legal deadline.
Proof
Each control's query runs every day and records the Evidence it returns, through Evidence collection. A control without current Evidence opens an Issue. Compliance is a property of the records, not a quarterly project.
Next
- Legal Team: who staffs it, what runs when, and what it measures.
- Customer paper: every document a Customer accepts or reads.
- Legal floor: every row, its trigger, and its signer.