Transforming how climate-aligned legal content is used

Background

The Chancery Lane Project (TCLP), is a UK-based legal nonprofit driving climate action through contracts.

TCLP’s clause library is widely respected, built on years of collaboration between legal and climate experts. But as the organisation itself recognised, creating good quality content is not enough in a world where AI is shifting the way people interact with knowledge and information. The key is in embedding that content into the technology that lawyers are using every day to review and draft contracts.

At the same time, the legal landscape is shifting rapidly. As noted in TCLP’s own update:

This shift presents both an opportunity and a risk. Without the right tools, climate considerations risk being left behind as workflows evolve.

The challenge

The core challenge was enabling climate-aligned legal content to be used in practice across a wide and complex ecosystem.

This meant addressing key questions:

• How do we surface relevant content at the right moment?
• How do we support people who don’t identify as legal experts?
• How do we integrate into tools and workflows that are rapidly changing?

It also meant recognising that influence doesn’t sit solely with lawyers.

As one insight from the project highlighted:

Our approach

We took a hypothesis-led, experimental approach, prioritising learning in a fast-moving space.

Understanding the ecosystem

We looked for opportunities across the contract lifecycle for a typical large commercial company with an extensive supplier network - from strategy and procurement through to delivery - to identify where decisions are being made that could influence the level of climate ambition that is written into a contract.

We also explored a wide range of user needs, including:

• Lawyers drafting and reviewing contracts
• Procurement teams shaping supplier requirements
• Sustainability leads setting organisational ambition
• Senior decision-makers influencing strategy

This revealed a key gap: many of the people influencing contracts don’t directly engage with legal content.

Rapid experimentation

Rather than relying on long discovery phases, we focused on learning through action:

• Frequent conversations with stakeholders
• Low-fidelity sketches and prototypes
• Continuous testing and iteration

This approach allowed the team to quickly check assumptions and understanding through practical immersion.

This helped the team adapt quickly as both user needs and the technology landscape evolved.

Prototyping new interactions

We developed three public ‘provocotypes, published on TCLP Labs:

• Align contracts with SBTi standards
• Benchmark contracts against GRI standards
• Compare tender documents against climate ambition

These tools explored how users could:

• Compare their own documents against trusted standards
• Translate legal content into actionable insights
• Take steps to improve contracts and processes

This work directly informed the development of TCLP Labs as a platform.

As described in a LinkedIn launch post:

What we learnt

TCLP’s research and engagement team tested the provocotypes with lawyers, procurement leads, legal tech founders, researchers and in-house counsel across organisations in 8 countries. Some were experts in climate law, while others had never encountered TCLP before.

Benchmarking over browsing

One of the strongest insights was that users don’t want to browse legal libraries - they want to evaluate and improve their own work.

Benchmarking against trusted standards proved far more engaging than search or discovery.

This aligns with how the platform is positioned externally. As reported in The Global Legal Post:

Designing for upstream users

The project challenged the assumption that lawyers are the primary audience.

In reality, upstream decision-makers - such as sustainability and procurement leads - play a critical role in shaping outcomes.

However, they need different kinds of support:

• Translation of legal concepts into practical guidance
• Tools that connect strategy to delivery
• Clear actions, not just information

As one stakeholder insight captured:

The importance of action

Across all prototypes, a consistent theme emerged: insight alone isn’t enough.

Users need:

• Clear recommendations
• Practical next steps
• Outputs they can share and act on

This shifts the role of legal tech from information provider to decision-support tool.

Working in the open

The project team also took a deliberately open approach - sharing prototypes and learnings publicly. This helped build momentum and excitement across the legal tech and climate communities.

Outcome

By publishing prototypes through TCLP Labs, the team created a live platform for continued experimentation and collaboration. TCLP Labs hosts a suite of AI and digital tools designed to help lawyers, procurement teams, and sustainability professionals turn climate expertise into practical solutions for drafting and assessing climate-aligned contracts.

The work also surfaced a broader strategic opportunity: to support not just lawyers, but the wider network of people influencing contracting decisions. TCLP has since developed one of the provocotypes to work with their Knowledge Graph, producing on the fly analysis of tender documents and sustainability strategies.

The experimental, open approach helped TCLP to build a collaborative community of innovators in the climate tech space. This community helps create a foundation for scaling climate-aligned contracting - helping organisations translate ambition into action through the contracts that shape how they operate.