Adapt our legal content

About this playbook

This playbook helps you adapt our legal content resources. Whether you are localising a climate clause or creating something new, we provide a practical framework for adapting climate-aligned legal content to fit your needs and country-specific context.

Why we’re sharing our methods. Since 2019, we’ve built an open-source library of climate-aligned legal content. But this is only part of our story. The approaches we use to create, test, and maintain our content are equally valuable. We’re democratising the knowledge of how to create high-quality, ambitious legal tools that drive decarbonisation and nature action.

Incorporate our content standards. As legal content creation increasingly involves AI tools, maintaining quality and ambition is critical. This playbook helps you incorporate TCLP’s content development approaches and standards into your work.

Principles and practices

Creating ambitious and impactful climate-aligned legal content isn’t just about expert-led legal input, it’s about co-developing tools and resources that drive real climate and nature action.

We invite you to consider, implement and improve our principles and practices, whether you’re working with AI-generated clauses or refining content through collaborative, human-led expertise.

Incorporate design thinking

Design thinking sits at the heart of how we conceptualise, create, maintain and improve our legal content. We put users at the centre and our process generally involves:

• Generate ideas: Discuss concepts and approaches based on user needs, climate and nature outcomes and scalable impact. This involves understanding problems affecting target audiences, researching existing literature and methodologies, and brainstorming potential solutions, for example through legal hackathons.
• Create drafts: Develop initial versions of content and share them with colleagues and users. These drafts should capture core concepts but don’t need to be perfectly polished – the goal is to have something good enough to get quick feedback on.
• Get feedback: Test content with users. This involves sharing your work with a range of stakeholders, including legal practitioners, business professionals and technical experts. Testing should focus on both legal effectiveness and practical usability in real-world contexts.
• Refine and release: Improve the content based on feedback, especially aligning with user and technology needs. Publish the content, share it and implement feedback loops to ensure you continue getting feedback.
• Measure, maintain and improve: Collect usage data, gather feedback and make iterative improvements based on what you learn from users. Ensure the content remains up to date and usable for your audience.

While you may not use this process in a linear way (we don’t always either) it aims to provides a flexible framework to create content that is not just legally sound but actually works in practice.

Identify content needs and know your users

Start by understanding the purpose of your content, who the users are, and what they need. This ensures your work serves a practical purpose while driving meaningful action.

When adapting TCLP content for different contexts, consider:

• Legal and market context
  • What climate-related laws, cases, standards and disclosure requirements apply?
  • How does the local legal system or sector affect interpretation and enforcement?
  • What’s the market maturity for climate and nature-aligned contracting?
• Climate priorities
  • Are you focussing on decarbonisation, adaptation and resilience, nature and biodiversity, or wider environmental issues, like plastic pollution?
  • What climate risks and opportunities are most relevant?
• Practical realities
  • What legal documents or processes will this be incorporated into?
  • How might this affect different organisations (SMEs vs. multinational companies)?
  • Are there sector-specific standards or practices to align with?
• Social considerations
  • Who could be impacted by this content (workers, local communities, vulnerable groups)?
  • What language or accessibility needs exist?

Exploring these considerations will require desktop research as well as engagement with users. We use methods like:

• Discovery interviews with target audiences about their current challenges and needs
• Hackathons and workshops to crowdsource information, observe patterns on how users understand the content, and co-create solutions with them
• Surveys to gather feedback on content needs and identify common pain points.

Leverage pro bono contributions

Use pro bono contributions from legal experts to develop and maintain content. We’ve proven this is an effective and scalable way of creating climate-aligned legal content.

Pro bono contributions can range from peer reviewing content to participating in hackathons.

Benefits include:

• Access to diverse expertise across jurisdictions, sectors and practice areas
• Expert input to stress test and quality assure AI generated outputs
• Creating content that reflects market practice and addresses practical challenges
• Building a community of climate-conscious legal professionals who support and champion the content.

Tips for managing contributions:

• Provide specific briefs with clear objectives and background information
• Set clear, short deadlines (2-3 weeks works better than open-ended timeframes)
• Create opportunities for collaboration through workshops, industry-specific working groups and smart technology decisions, like Google Docs
• Be mindful of busy periods in the legal and commercial calendar (for example, year-end, financial reporting seasons).

Include multiple perspectives

Creating, reviewing and maintaining legal content means legal professionals, from trainees to partners, are an essential part of the process. It is vital that lawyers with significant and relevant post-qualified experience are not only included but have oversight over participants with less.

It is equally important to involve a wider range of stakeholders in the development process. Key perspectives include:

• Business professionals, like procurement and supply chain leads
• Technical experts, like ESG and sustainability teams
• Academics, researchers and scientists with expertise in climate, nature and environment issues.

Benefits of diverse input:

• More robust and effective legal content, aligned with best practices and rooted in legal, technical, academic and scientific expertise
• Increased legitimacy and trust in the content, because of the diversity and quality of the experts who contribute
• Better understanding of potential unintended consequences.

Create a review process

Legal content needs rigorous and continuous testing. This is because trust in the content is critical for use.

To ensure high-quality, peer reviewed, open access content, create content standards and design a review process that includes input from a diverse range of expertise and perspectives.

The review process could take place while the content is being developed and before it is made available, or part of a public consultation for feedback.

Read our quality assurance process to see our approach to developing and maintaining content.

Maintain quality and ambition

When adapting content for different contexts, it’s crucial to maintain quality and ensure high climate ambition.

Incorporate TCLP’s content standards into your work or create your own benchmarks. Our standards provide guardrails that support ambitious decarbonisation targets, help avoid greenwashing and unintended consequences, as well as making content accessible to diverse audiences.

Key considerations include:

• Environmental and social integrity: Ensure adaptations don’t dilute the core commitments or effectiveness of the legal mechanisms. Create a process that prevents unintended impacts like greenwashing, limiting nature action or hindering a just transition.
• Legal robustness: Maintain high standards of legal drafting, ensuring clarity, usability and enforceability. Ensure that content is accessible to target audiences.
• Alignment with science: Keep content aligned with the latest climate science, recognised standards, and domestic and international targets.
• Continuous improvement: Strive to enhance ambition and effectiveness over time, rather than settling for the lowest common denominator.

Ensure content is up to date

Legal content needs to be maintained to reflect updated climate science, legal and market developments and evolving user needs.

Effective maintenance approaches include:

1. Create content focused on universal principles that don’t go out of date quickly. For example, we created guides that can be used in any jurisdiction to sit alongside climate clauses that only work in one
2. Establish regular review cycles and deadlines (for example, annual or biennial). Prompt Large Language Models (LLMs) for a content update assessment and instruct pro bono partners to review and improve through professional judgement
3. Create mechanisms to gather ongoing feedback from users. For example, our website allows visitors to:
   • Give feedback on all resources
   • Download content into a document
   • Get email alerts when content is updated.
4. Consolidate content with similar themes or clear use cases so that users can navigate it more quickly and in one place. For example, we published the Consolidated Sustainability Clauses for Supply Chain Contracts in September 2025.

Please read our disclaimer on using AI before using the example prompt below.

Example AI prompt - content update assessment

I need to assess whether this climate-aligned legal[clause/guidance] requires updating based on recent developments in law, climate science, and recognised standards.

**The clause/guide:**
[PASTE YOUR CLAUSE/GUIDE TEXT HERE]

**Last reviewed/published:** [DATE]

**Context:**

- Jurisdiction: [e.g., England and Wales, EU, Kenya]
- Sector/industry: [e.g., construction, supply chain, finance]
- Topic area: [e.g., supply chain emissions, net zero targets, nature restoration]

---

Please assess whether this [clause/guide] needs updating by checking for developments since the last review date in:

1. **Legal and regulatory changes:** New legislation, case law, or regulatory guidance in the relevant jurisdiction
2. **Climate science updates:** New IPCC findings, updated climate targets, or revised scientific consensus
3. **Standards evolution:** Changes to recognised frameworks (e.g., GHG Protocol, SBTi, TNFD, ISO standards)
4. **Market practice:** Significant shifts in industry best practice or emerging approaches

**Important:** Only cite developments that you can verify from reliable sources. Include the source and date for any significant changes you identify. If you're uncertain whether something has changed, state this clearly rather than speculating.

**Assessment:**
Provide one of these conclusions with brief supporting explanation:

- **Needs update:** Significant developments require revision
- **Review recommended:** Some relevant changes worth considering
- **No update needed:** Content remains current and aligned with latest developments

Make the content accessible and usable

Legal content won’t have impact if people can’t find, understand and use it.

Effective accessibility and usability approaches include:

1. Structure content logically, including clear headings, page contents, key definitions, publication and last updated dates, and where it applies in practice. See how we structure climate clauses for inspiration.
2. Provide introductory context, background information and user notes. For example, “What this clause does” or “This guide enables organisations to”.
3. Create a style guide for writing content, naming conventions and legal drafting. Ensure this is driven by consistency, user needs and avoiding legalese.
4. Use plain language that is accessible to diverse audiences, including C-suite, corporate governance teams, procurement professionals and in-house and private practice legal advisors.
5. Create and publish a disclaimer on how others can use the content and the terms that apply. For example, we share information on content licensing and AI access.
6. Ensure digital accessibility for users. For example, we adhere to Worldwide Web Consortium’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (W3C WCAG) version 2.1 AA standard.