Legal Architecture
Complex collaborations bring together various institutions and individuals through diverse legal forms, roles, and relationships into what we call Legal Architecture. We experimented with different concepts and forms, in the hope that these may better support complex collaborations to disrupting norms and values, ownership, and power.
Our Observations
The legal architecture in any complex collaboration will be distinct, depending on the number and nature of partners, institutional norms, geographical spread, and more. There will normally be a range of interrelating forms and relationships, with people holding various legal roles within them, creating a more complex environment than a traditional legal form.
Our observation was that many readily available legal forms and relationships impose 'deep codes' that misalign with a collaboration's intended governance, particularly concerning risk and power. While collaborations may democratically design many operational aspects, the underlying legal architecture—crucial for how governance is lived—is rarely discussed in the same detail
The Experiment
We aimed to create a Legal Architecture that invited all partners into transparent, mission-aligned legal relationships, avoiding separate or deep code-misaligned agreements. We also experimented whether it was possible to nudge deep codes shifts in ‘brown field’ environments where existing legal architecture would prevent the use of a ‘new route’. This included testing how the deep codes we identified could be brought into existing legal forms and relationships.
Our Learnings
Legal System Architecture
An experimenter’s log showing the key legal areas we explored and how these connect to deep code shifts
Process Orchestration
A process log showing the key orchestration and stewardship steps we took and how our learnings might apply to others
Many-to-Many Agreement Example
An example showing how we experimented with embedding deep code shifts into agreements