Our quality assurance process

Overview

The Chancery Lane Project (TCLP) ensures its legal content is high-quality, relevant, and trustworthy to support decarbonisation and nature-positive outcomes.

Our standards

• Our content aligns with supporting ambitious decarbonisation targets.
• It is rigorously quality-assured to guard against greenwashing and unintended adverse impacts, such as hindering a just transition.
• Practical, plain-language content accessible to diverse audiences including C-suite, corporate governance teams, procurement professionals and in-house and private practice legal advisors.

Our approach

A structured, risk-based method balances regular updates and expert input while considering changing legal and market conditions. This balances the need to keep our legal content up to date, high calibre, leveraging expert insights, and minimising administrative challenges.

What we maintain

We focus on maintaining high quality core content, which includes: our guides; a prioritised subset of clauses frequently used to meet climate targets; and glossary terms.

All content is timestamped to indicate its last review date. Some clauses are not routinely maintained (so carry an older timestamp) but remain in our library as valuable examples of how contract clauses can be used for decarbonisation and nature-positive outcomes.

Core content undergoes annual reviews or updates following significant legal or market changes.

Quality assurance process

• Initial review: Conducted by solicitors with relevant expertise, supervised by partners, ensuring relevance and accuracy.
• Peer review: Independent scrutiny by solicitors with relevant experience also supervised by a partner. Peer reviewers stress-test the quality and conclusions of the initial review, ensuring robust and defensible legal content.
• Independent third party expert review: We've introduced an additional quality assurance layer - where we invite independent third party experts in non-legal technical subjects like current climate science, decarbonisation, nature and relevant standards and benchmarks, to verify and fact check our content from their specialist perspective.*
• TCLP review: Reviewed by our senior in-house subject matter expert lawyer team.

The number and depth of peer review rounds are proportionate to the specific risks posed by the legal content in question.

*We tested different approaches to this in 2024 and, following successful pilots, are adding this layer into our quality assurance workflow for new content and future updates of our core (maintained) collection. 

International clauses

Clauses from our England and Wales collection are sometimes adapted for use under the laws of other jurisdictions by pro bono teams of lawyers from those countries. We provide guidance on how to adapt clauses, including applying TCLP’s quality assurance standards for these adaptations. The responsibility for quality assurance and peer review rests with the relevant subject matter experts within each country-level team.

Keeping you informed

You can subscribe to email updates for our legal content, through the "Get email alerts for updates" buttons.

How to contribute

Help us keep our legal content current by giving feedback using the "Give Feedback" buttons or join TCLP’s pro bono lawyer community.