Fenwick & West open-sources startup finance docs on GitHub

Tech-focused law firm Fenwick & West has today posted the latest version of its Series Seed documents on early-stage startup funding to GitHub, the go-to service for developers to host and share code repositories.

The Series Seed includes stuff every founder needs — docs for incorporation, sorting out equity, and term sheets for investors.

By hosting the documents on GitHub, Fenwick & West reps said in a statement, “We have attempted to move even further in this direction by creating a set of documents that are easier to use and storing these documents in a place where they can develop and spread more efficiently.”

The third and lastest versions of the documents include changes to make sure they work well with various online systems, such as AngelList’s online deal-closing process. And while updates to the docs used to begin and end with email chains and blog comments, they’ll now live on GitHub.

“Engineers in our community use GitHub to showcase their work, solicit feedback, and make their project better through teamwork,” the reps continued. “We are taking a page from their playbook. Legal documents operate a lot like software (although they rely on a human interpreter), so GitHub is a logical place for these documents to reside.”

GitHub is based in San Francisco; itself a startup, the company famously took a record-breaking $100 million Series A last year. Currently, the service boasts 3 million members and 5 million repositories.