Legal Architecture

Complex collaborations bring together various institutions and individuals through diverse legal forms, roles, and relationships into what we call Legal Architecture.

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.

Insights, resources and tools

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.

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.

Below are our lessons and insights developed from this work. [COMING SOON]