Legal desk

Your factory can staff a General Counsel seat that runs the company’s legal desk: contracts, the cap table, the compliance calendar, and entity formation. You work with it the way you work with any teammate — by talking to it. Open Legal in the control room and use the “Ask …” box on the department header; the conversation opens in a side drawer, and the seat acts through its legal tools as you talk.

Everything the seat produces is a draft for your review. Sapient Works provides legal information and document automation, not legal advice — and that boundary is enforced by the platform, not by a disclaimer: anything binding either passes a deterministic policy gate you configured, or stops and waits for your explicit approval in Approvals. Filing anything with a government never happens from the platform, no matter what is approved.

Hiring the seat

Add the General Counsel role from the team library (it is hire-on-demand, not part of the default starting team). Any seat whose role mentions legal, counsel, or compliance gets the legal toolset in its direct messages and becomes the owner of the Legal screen.

What you can ask for

• Draft a contract. “Draft a mutual NDA with Acme Corp, Delaware law, 3-year term.” Mutual NDAs and IP assignments assemble from attorney-reviewed standard templates; other types (MSA, DPA, order forms, vendor and advisor agreements) are model-drafted. Every draft carries the legal-information notice and is stored in your document vault.
• Send it for execution. The execution gate decides: an unmodified standard template within the policy you set (contract type, counterparty risk, value cap) can auto-send for signature; anything model-drafted, redlined, or over-cap opens an approval for you first.
• Incorporate. “Prepare Delaware incorporation for ‘Acme, Inc.’ — C-corp, 10,000,000 authorized shares…” The seat assembles the certificate of incorporation into your vault — so you read exactly what would be filed — and opens a formation order behind an approval. Only after you approve does it go to the formation provider.
• Create and maintain the cap table. “Seed our cap table: founder A 6,000,000 common…” seeds the initial ownership; after that, changes go through issuances — “Issue 500,000 shares to our advisor under the executed board consent” records the grant and opens the approval that gates anything external. Ownership math is computed deterministically, never estimated by a model.
• Watch compliance. The calendar tracks 83(b) election clocks, 409A refreshes, Delaware franchise tax, and contract renewal dates — all computed from your records. Ask “what’s on our compliance calendar?” any time.
• Ask about your paperwork. “Do we need a DPA for EU customers?” answers only from your own documents, with citations — and declines questions that call for a lawyer’s judgment, routing them to counsel review instead of guessing.

The Legal screen

The Legal department page shows the whole desk at a glance: the contract lifecycle with its two human gates (counsel and sign-off), your matters, the cap table with its 83(b)/409A note, and the document vault (with retention and hold badges). Both lists paginate, so they stay readable at hundreds of matters or holders, and the cap table’s Holders & grants list has a live search over name, role, and share class. The “Update cap table” button drops you straight into a conversation with your counsel seat. Every vault row navigates to a reader page: a document that belongs to a matter opens that matter’s instrument page (below), and a standalone upload opens its own document page — the full text renders with a signed link to the original file, and any legal approvals waiting on you can be approved or rejected right there, so reviewing a certificate and green-lighting its formation is one motion.

Reading and signing a matter

Clicking a matter opens the instrument itself: the document renders in full, with your outside counsel’s notes shown inline (toggle them off to read clean) and the signature blocks at the foot. The right rail carries the decision: when the execution gate is waiting on you, Approve & sign releases the contract for e-signature — it binds once both parties have signed the envelope — and Request changes rejects the gate and opens a conversation with your legal seat for the specifics; earlier in the lifecycle the same card moves the draft along its chain — and reports honestly when the gate refuses, for example because counsel review is still required. Below it, the approval chain shows who has acted and who is next (drafted → counsel → your sign-off → executed), the counsel notes are collected verbatim, and the case file lists every contract, document, and calendar obligation on the matter.

The cap table, holder by holder

Clicking a cap-table row opens that holder: their shares, fully-diluted percentage, and blended vested percentage, then a card per grant — type, share count, strike, and a vesting bar computed deterministically from the recorded vesting schedule, never typed by hand. SAFEs show their principal and say plainly that nothing converts until the next priced round; repurchased or cancelled shares state what was netted out. A history section lists the equity transactions behind the numbers, and the unallocated option pool has its own page showing each plan’s reserved, allocated, and still-grantable counts.

What always requires your approval

Contract execution outside your auto-execute policy · every equity issuance · every formation submission. And two things never happen at all: government filings, and legal advice — both are platform-enforced refusals, not model behavior.