Five years ago, TCLP launched into the legal world with a “Climate Contract Playbook.” Fast forward to 2025, we’re introducing a new kind of playbook: a series of how-to resources that help you replicate our approaches, embed our content into your workflows, and create climate-aligned impact locally and globally.

These playbooks are light-touch, principles-led and easy to apply. Inspired by our success stories and shaped by feedback from our international community, they aim to make it easier for you to use law as a tool for transformative action, whether you are creating new clauses or building multidisciplinary networks.

We’ll launch a range of playbooks in the coming months. For now, this blog introduces our content adaptation playbook, and discusses what this means for scaling our content standards and democratising our work.

Adapting our legal content into something new

One of the first playbooks supports users to adapt TCLP content for their own contexts. For example:

• Localising supply chain clauses to fit country-specific needs
• Creating new content for climate issues beyond decarbonisation, like adaptation, resilience, and just transition
• Exploring innovation opportunities in areas such as nature and biodiversity, or professional services within and adjacent to law.

We know that legal systems, market realities and climate challenges vary across countries and industries. A clause drafted by London-trained lawyers may not land in the same way in Kenya or Hong Kong. While we proudly host jurisdiction-specific content, we identified a need for a framework to make the adaptation of our legal resources more practical and scalable.

This playbook captures the principles and practices we’ve followed and refined since 2019, including:

• Applying design thinking to content design
• Ensuring quality and ambition from legal, commercial, and scientific perspectives
• Keeping content up to date with market developments and evolving needs.

This resource is dealing with something which is real for me. I appreciate the fact that you’re tackling it. Legal professional and innovator based in Nairobi

What we’ve learned so far

To shape this playbook, we interviewed participants across different regions. We heard that:

• Localisation matters. Lawyers and businesses need frameworks and supporting materials to adapt content into local needs. In the Africa context, for example, one user emphasised the need to focus on climate adaptation and resilience more than cutting emissions.
• Share success stories. Examples of how TCLP approaches have been effective in the past help build confidence. On the other hand, reflections on what hasn’t worked, and why, is also useful.
• Demand for practical tools. Templates, step-by-step guidance and AI prompts all help people move quickly from first principles to real-world practice.
• Different users, different needs. Established networks want deeper frameworks that are easy to transpose, whereas individual practitioners need something lighter, actionable and aligned with their day-to-day workflows.

These insights validated some of our assumptions: adapting legal content is not just about translation. It’s also about trust, context and usability.

Scaling our content standards

Alongside these user needs, one message came through clearly: trust in quality is essential.

Creating high-quality, co-created legal content at scale isn’t easy – and it has never been more important. We know that AI is rapidly changing how people access and generate content. While fewer people might land on our website directly, more lawyers than ever could be reading and reusing our work through AI tools.

That shift raises important questions around what makes legal content ambitious, accurate and relevant. This is where our content standards come in. They are the guardrails that support ambitious decarbonisation targets, help avoid greenwashing, and make content accessible across audiences and jurisdictions.

Our standards are built into every stage of our quality assurance process – from initial drafting and peer review, to expert input and final TCLP oversight. Together, these checks give users confidence that the content is both rigorous and practical.

As users increasingly adapt our content and legal professionals prompt AI to generate bespoke versions of TCLP clauses, standards around what qualifies as “high quality” need to be clearly understood and applied in practice. Our content standards, as well as documentation on how our clauses work, provide reference points for what “good” looks like: ambitious on climate, scientifically sound, and usable in real-world contracts.

Openness and co-design are core to our work. By sharing our approaches and standards transparently, we encourage everyone adapting TCLP content to use them, and help us improve them too. In doing so, we can scale content that is trustworthy, ambitious, and capable of driving meaningful change wherever it’s used.

A commitment to democratising our work

The development of these playbooks reflects an important realisation: the approaches behind our legal content are just as valuable as the clauses themselves.

As one participant told us: we need practical tools and success stories to enable immediate action. That’s exactly what playbooks aim to provide.

Open-source legal content has always been part of TCLP’s DNA. Increasingly, we’re extending that to our methods and learnings. By making these tools and stories freely available, we’re committing to the democratisation of our work. This means giving others the means to adapt, apply and scale it in their own contexts.

Future playbooks will cover how to host legal hackathons and how to work with AI tools. Each will be shaped by user insights, grounded in practice and designed to help you use our work with confidence.

We invite you to explore them, share your experiences, and most importantly – make them your own. By working together in this way, we can turn global ideas into local impact, and strengthen the role of contracts in driving climate and nature action.