Workstate Docs

Legal & compliance ​

Policies and contracts in one searchable place, with an attributed record of decisions.

Who it's for ​

In-house counsel, compliance officers, contract managers and risk teams, and the colleagues who bring them questions.

What Workstate does for you ​

You upload your policies and contracts into a namespace of their own. Agents answer questions by quoting the clause and citing the document it came from.

When the team settles how to read a clause, or what position to take, the agent records it as a decision in the ledger. Each decision is attributed to the person who recorded it, and nobody can rewrite it. The next time the question comes up, from a colleague or a questionnaire, the answer is the same one, with its source.

Workstate supports your team's research. It doesn't give legal advice: a qualified person decides.

The prompts below are illustrative. Change the documents and project names to your own.

Answer a policy question with the clause ​

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Does our data retention policy allow us to keep support logs for 18 months? Quote the relevant section and cite the document.

Find clauses across contracts ​

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Which of our supplier agreements have a termination-for-convenience clause? For each one you find, give the file and quote the clause.

Record an interpretation ​

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Record a decision in project "privacy": our position on whether analytics cookies need consent for visitors in the EU. Include the reasoning, the documents it relies on, and who agreed it.

Reuse earlier positions ​

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Before I answer this security questionnaire, search the ledger for our recorded positions on subprocessors and data residency. Flag any that were superseded.

Sources to connect ​

Available now

  • Upload files, for policies, contracts and regulatory guidance. PDF, Word, Excel and PowerPoint files can be up to 50 MiB each, with up to 2 GiB and 20,000 files per source.
  • Confluence, if your policies already live in a space there.
  • Jira, for compliance tracking projects.

Coming soon

  • Google Drive Coming soon
  • Microsoft Teams and Office Coming soon

Set up a separate namespace ​

Workstate has no per-document permissions Coming soon. Everyone with access to a namespace can search everything in it. So:

  1. Ask an admin to create a namespace for legal material only, such as "Legal".
  2. Upload documents into that namespace, not into a shared one.
  3. Give it only to the people who need it. An owner or admin selects the namespace when inviting someone, or in the person's row in the Namespaces column on the Team page. Removing it there takes effect from the person's next request.

Everyone who is an owner or admin when the namespace is created is given it. Another owner or admin can remove an admin's access afterwards, but only an owner can change an owner's. Only owners and admins can upload or delete files.

Instructions to give your agents ​

Add these rules to the shared agent instructions:

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- Quote the clause and cite the document for every answer. Never paraphrase a clause without its citation.
- If the documents don't answer the question, say so. Don't fill gaps from general knowledge.
- Before answering, search the ledger for recorded positions on the same question, and follow the current one.
- Record a new position only when a person has agreed it, and say who.

Ledger habits ​

  • One decision per position or interpretation. The summary states the question. The current state gives the position and who agreed it.
  • Supersede when the law or the policy changes. The old position stays on record, with the date it stopped applying.
  • Investigation for research that hasn't led to a position yet.
  • Agree with your counsel what belongs in the ledger. Its history is append-only and visible to everyone in the namespace.

An illustrative example ​

Illustrative

A sales lead asks whether a customer contract can accept unlimited liability for data breaches. Their agent finds contracts-0006, a decision recorded by the head of legal: liability is capped at 12 months' fees, and any exception needs the general counsel's approval. The agent quotes the contracting policy that the decision cites.

The sales lead has an answer in minutes. Legal sees the same question answered the same way each time, with the reasoning attached.

Limits to know ​

  • No per-document permissions. Everyone with access to the namespace sees every document and topic in it.
  • Only text is indexed. A scanned PDF without a text layer has no text to search. The source's Sync history flags each one.
  • Uploads change only when an admin uploads a new version. Uploading a file to the same path replaces it.
  • Search returns the best matches, not an exhaustive list. For a full clause review, check the documents themselves.
  • Everyone signs in with GitHub, so each person needs a GitHub account. SSO Coming soon and audit export Coming soon aren't available yet.
  • Read Security & privacy before you upload regulated material.

Next steps ​

Workstate is built by Nerdstorm Pty Ltd, Sydney.