Leena Rao currently works as a writer for TechCrunch.
She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... → Learn More
One of the winners at today’s TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon is Docracy, an open source site where users can share and sign legal documents, similar to what GitHub provides for code. The site is the brainchild of mobile app developers Matt Hall and John Watkinson, who are the founders of app development startup Larva Labs.
Docracy is an online, opensource hub for quality legal documents like contracts, NDAs, wills, trusts and more. So startups or individuals can take their legal documents and compare them against these trusted, documents on Docracy and see what terms differ.
Hall and Watkinson were recently were signing an NDA with a client and wasn’t sure if there were any terms in the NDA that should be flagged, or that were out of the ordinary. But they found that the issue didn’t warrant spending money on a lawyer. Small business and individuals have to sign legal documents all the time but often don’t have the resources to hire a lawyer to review these documents.
It’s a great idea and certainly one that many bootstrapped startups, freelancers or individuals can use in a pinch. While Docracy’s site isn’t up yet, we’re told it will be publicly released this week.
so can we get Docracy's mic?
It's like the Hackathon all over again.
Hello?
Hello .
Okay, alright. Great.
Oh and it's up, perfect .
So, I'm Matt.
This is John.
Our designer Alvro is watching from home.
So I want to say hi to him and our hack was called Docracy. And it's essentially a Github for legal documents.
So this came from us being like a small start up and we get a lot of documents to sign, like NDAs and so on, and stuff that we don't know the source of them.
They come in via email and they're probably fine.
It's not worth getting a lawyer check it out, but it's something that you're a little nervous when you're signing it.
What we wanted is something where there could be a source for documents that everyone trusts.
They come from a source that you recognize, and we provide free signing of those documents online, then we can tract how often they are being used.
So, for example, we've imported the Y Combinator series --a term sheet here.
It's just right off the website and you can see it's been signed 114 times by Hardy, so you can trust it a certain amount there.
So we want to sign this document online, so hit there.
Now this has become a private document which you can edit with terms that are specific to your deal. No one else can see them. But because you're sending it to someone and they're expecting to see the standard Y Combinator document, you want to put in there with some different terms. So let's enter something in there now.
So this is a Series A, so this is a fairly standard chain. We're trying to take control of their firstborn child. We just want to get that in there and we send it.
Give it 10 seconds.
If we switch over to the other side you can see now, this is the person that's receiving the document. There's something ready to review. When we review it, the change is highlighted in green and so on. You can sign it and complete the transaction here. So it's basically a way for startups and other, any small business to get documents they trust for free and sign them.
