OpenAgreements

OpenAgreements helps people and software agents find primary-source-backed U.S. legal guidance and produce reviewable DOCX files from standard agreement templates.

What OpenAgreements does

• Publishes jurisdiction-specific practice guides with citations to primary law.
• Provides standard agreement templates with source and license metadata.
• Fills templates locally through a CLI or over MCP.
• Publishes review checklists and comparison surveys in human- and machine-readable formats.

OpenAgreements provides legal information and document mechanics, not legal advice. It does not decide whether a form or clause is right for a transaction, and generated documents are drafts for human review.

The project’s longer-term goal is a citable conformance layer for legal AI: primary law becomes inspectable requirements, an AI can check a document against them, and a lawyer owns the final call. Read Why OpenAgreements Exists for the rationale; this README stays focused on using the project.

Fill your first agreement

Install the CLI locally, inspect the available forms, and fill the Common Paper Mutual NDA:

npm install -g open-agreements
open-agreements list
open-agreements fill common-paper-mutual-nda \
  --set party_1_name="Jane Doe" \
  --set party_1_company="Acme Manufacturing, Inc." \
  --set party_2_name="John Smith" \
  --set party_2_company="Northeast Logistics LLC" \
  --set effective_date="2026-07-15" \
  --set purpose="Evaluating a potential logistics relationship" \
  --output mutual-nda.docx

The last command writes mutual-nda.docx. Open it in Word or another DOCX viewer and review every filled term before signature. Defaults supply the standard one-year term, Delaware governing law, and other omitted cover terms; the CLI reports any priority fields that still need attention.

For a complete, copyable example and field-review steps, follow the quick start.

Understand the workflow

standard form + source and license metadata
  → supplied field values
  → validation and local rendering
  → reviewable DOCX
  → human legal and business review

The standard form is authoritative until rendering. Your supplied values become the transaction-specific inputs. The generated DOCX is an output for review; it is never automatically accepted or signed.

The legal-content path is separate: practice guides cite primary sources, surveys compare jurisdictions, and checklists turn requirements into review steps. Those materials can inform a decision, but they do not mutate an agreement.

Choose your next step

• Install OpenAgreements — choose local CLI, local MCP, or hosted MCP.
• Fill a standard agreement — complete the canonical workflow end to end.
• Use legal guidance and checklists — find the right human- or machine-readable source.
• Connect an AI agent — configure Claude Code, Codex CLI, Cursor, or Gemini CLI.
• Browse the full catalog — templates, guides, surveys, checklists, skills, and packages.
• Understand system boundaries — follow content and documents through the system.
• Contribute — change code, documentation, templates, or field-selectors.

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Privacy and document handling

• Local CLI and local stdio MCP processing stay on your machine.
• Hosted MCP template filling runs server-side; filled documents are not stored after the response is returned.
• Some field-selector workflows download an official source document at runtime.

Choose an execution mode that matches your document-sensitivity and internal policy requirements. See the trust-boundary status and security policy.

License

Project code is licensed under Apache License 2.0. Content retains its source-specific license. See the licensing reference and each template's metadata.yaml before redistribution or modification.