All organisations have legal documents, like contract or agreement templates, and policies and procedures. These documents have often been in place for some time and are at varying degrees of maturity. Most legal documents are living documents in the sense that they have to be upgraded or updated from time to time. Nothing stays the same and change is accelerating. Business models change, laws change, the enterprise culture changes and the people in organisations change. Legal documents have to iterate, adapt or align with these changes.

We fix broken and incomplete documents

People within the organisation should update the document when it needs updating due to changes within the organisation. But when the trigger is an external change (like a change in law) it often makes sense for an external specialist expert to review the document and update it.

The desired outcome is good up-to-date documents

We’re aiming for beautiful legal documents because they bring significant benefits to you.

How we can help you

  1. Update your existing policies, agreements, terms or contracts to ensure they comply (or are aligned) with applicable data protection laws by joining a data protection programme.
  2. Update your data processing agreements (which may be included in your SLAs) by joining a data protection programme.
  3. Update your documents for Companies Act compliance by asking us to review them.
  4. Update your agreement for CPA Compliance by asking us to review them.
  5. Ensure that your document complies (or is aligned) with applicable laws (for example the GDPR and POPIA), contains the essential elements, is in line with current best practices, and is complete to the extent that it needs to be by asking us to review it.
  6. Check that your agreements (either templates or instances) are fair and appropriate having regard to the nature of the relationship, clarify issues that are unclear, comply with the law, will not create legal problems and is enforceable.
  7. Control how documents get reviewed in your organisation by asking us to draft you a document review policy.

Examples of some documents we review and update

Policies

  1. Lots of different types of policies, but especially IT policies, data governance policies, data protection policies and compliance policies.
  2. Privacy policy (for users, customers or consumers)
  3. Privacy policy (for suppliers)
  4. Privacy policy (for employees)
  5. Cookie policy and notice
  6. Data protection policy
  7. Access to information manual (PAIA Manual)

Agreement and contract templates

  1. IT contract templates
  2. Data processing agreement (or DPA) templates
  3. Employment contract templates
  4. Commercial lease agreement templates

What we need from you

We can give you a fixed price quote (or at least an accurate estimate) of what our fees will be to review and update one of your documents. To do this there are a few things we need from you.

  1. How many documents are there?
  2. Please provide all the documents or a sample of one of them.
  3. How many pages in total are there?

What is the scope of a review?

It is essential that we are on the same page when it comes to the scope of the review. Is it comprehensive and in-depth or high-level focusing on the major issues or showstoppers? Localising a document for specific countries or globalising a document is a type of review but they are more about changing a document rather than updating one. This is also the case when it comes to converting documents into plain language.