Legal and compliance review¶

Legal and compliance work often starts messy: source material, extracted obligations, risk notes, comparisons, questions, draft policies, reviewer comments.

AI can help with the first pass. The team still needs documents that are readable, shareable, controlled, and exportable.

That is where OpenDocs fits.

The problem¶

Markdown is a good working format for legal and compliance research because it is plain text, diffable, and easy for agents to generate.

But the people reviewing the work may not want a raw .md file. They may want:

• a readable link
• a polished PDF
• a DOCX they can mark up
• a stable version for review
• workspace-only access while the analysis is sensitive

OpenDocs lets the working format stay Markdown while the review format becomes a clean document.

The OpenDocs workflow¶

Create a project for the matter, policy area, or review:

opendocs project create "Vendor DPA review" --slug vendor-dpa-review --use

Publish the research notes privately to the workspace:

opendocs publish ./legal-review --tags legal,compliance,review

When something is ready to send outside the team, export it:

opendocs export vendor-risk-summary --format pdf --output ./vendor-risk-summary.pdf
opendocs export vendor-risk-summary --format docx --output ./vendor-risk-summary.docx

Example documents in a review project¶

vendor-dpa-review/
  source-summary.md
  obligation-matrix.md
  risk-notes.md
  reviewer-questions.md
  final-summary.md

The rough notes stay available to the team. The final summary can become a PDF or Word document.

Why this is useful¶

Legal and compliance work benefits from a clear audit trail:

• What did we look at?
• What did the agent extract?
• What did a human review?
• What changed between drafts?
• Which version was shared?

OpenDocs does not replace legal judgment. It gives the work a better container.

Visibility matters¶

Most legal and compliance docs should start as workspace visibility. That means the team can review them, but the public cannot.

Only make a document public when it is intentionally public:

opendocs visibility final-summary public --confirm-public

The explicit confirmation is there on purpose. Sensitive documents should not become public by accident.

When to use this¶

Use OpenDocs for:

• policy analysis
• regulatory mapping
• contract review notes
• due diligence summaries
• internal risk memos
• compliance implementation plans
• board or management briefing drafts

The pattern is simple: let AI and Markdown move fast, then publish the result into a controlled document workspace.