Introduction to LegalCloud

LegalCloud is a SaaS platform for managing and distributing legal documents (privacy policies, terms of service, cookie policies, etc.) across multiple websites and platforms. It gives legal teams a single source of truth and embeds the latest approved version on every channel — websites, partner portals, mobile apps, customer portals.

Key concepts

Before you start, understand these four core entities:

• Document — a legal text with versioning, multi-language support, and an immutable SHA-256 fingerprint. Documents are the atom of LegalCloud. Every change creates a new version; old versions remain accessible.
• Site — a destination where documents are published. A site can be a corporate website (legalcloud.io), a partner portal, or a specific landing page. Documents are assigned to one or more sites; each site has its own embed code, analytics, and CORS allowlist.
• API token — a long-lived bearer credential that lets external systems (your CMS, mobile app, partner portal) read documents programmatically. Tokens are scoped to a site and can be rotated without downtime.
• Organization — the workspace that owns documents, sites, tokens and members. An organization has exactly one plan (FREE / SILVER / GOLD / AGENCY) and an unlimited number of users.

What LegalCloud is NOT

LegalCloud is not:

• A document signing platform (we don't replace DocuSign or Adobe Sign).
• A legal advice tool (we don't generate contracts or review clauses).
• A CMS (we don't store images, videos, or arbitrary content — only legal text).
• A public website builder (you embed our documents on YOUR site, we don't host yours).

How a document flows

1. The legal team writes or uploads a document in the dashboard (or via the API).
2. LegalCloud stores the document, computes its SHA-256, and assigns it to one or more sites.
3. Your site, partner, or app fetches the document via the API or our public embed URLs.
4. Visitors see the current approved version. Analytics track views, geography, devices.
5. When the document changes, the new version goes live instantly. Old versions are archived and accessible via the API for compliance audits.

Architecture at a glance

┌────────────────────┐     ┌─────────────────────┐     ┌────────────────────┐
│   Dashboard        │     │   Public CDN        │     │  Your site / app   │
│   (LegalCloud)     │     │   (R2 + KV cache)   │     │  (consumer)        │
│                    │ ──► │                     │ ──► │                    │
│  - Editor          │     │  - /d/{hash}        │     │  - WordPress       │
│  - Members         │     │  - /api/public/...  │     │  - Odoo            │
│  - Analytics       │     │                     │     │  - JS/Python/PHP   │
└────────────────────┘     └─────────────────────┘     └────────────────────┘

When to use LegalCloud

• You have multiple websites or apps that need to display the same legal text.
• Your legal text changes frequently (cookie policy updates, GDPR changes, regional variations).
• You need immutable versioning for compliance and audit.
• You need real-time analytics on which policies your users actually read.
• You need multi-language support without duplicating your CMS.

If you only have a single static page that rarely changes, LegalCloud is overkill. If you need a full document management system with workflow, approval chains, and e-signatures, you need something more complex.

Next steps

• Quickstart: install in 5 minutes
• Generate your first API token
• Create your first document