---
title: Introducing TCLP Labs
date: 2026-04-21T13:37:18Z
modified: 2026-04-24T15:25:41Z
permalink: "https://labs.chancerylaneproject.org/2026/04/21/introducing-tclp-labs/"
type: post
status: publish
excerpt: TCLP Labs is our new platform for building and testing AI-powered tools that embed climate-aligned thinking into contracts. We are turning legal expertise into practical, usable solutions for the professionals shaping real-world outcomes.
wpid: 249
categories:
  - Uncategorized
featured_image: "https://labs.chancerylaneproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/tyler-lastovich-e31ANd1PXUw-unsplash-scaled.jpg"
---

AI tools, research platforms, and contract software are increasingly shaping how legal professionals access and use the content they rely on. We see this not as a threat, but as [an opportunity to embed climate-aligned thinking ](https://chancerylaneproject.org/news/beyond-legal-looking-at-ai-through-an-optimistic-lens/)directly into the environments where legal work already happens.

[TCLP Labs](https://labs.chancerylaneproject.org/) is the new digital platform we have built to do this. It hosts a suite of AI and digital tools designed to help lawyers, procurement teams, and sustainability professionals turn climate expertise into practical solutions for drafting and assessing climate-aligned contracts.

The platform brings together both ready-to-use tools and early-stage prototypes. We use the prototypes to run research sessions, gather feedback, and collaborate with legal tech providers. This allows us to continuously refine both our thinking and our implementation.

We aim to pair TCLP’s legal credibility with technical capability, so we can understand where our knowledge can travel, who needs it, and how it should be delivered when it gets there.

### **What we built and why**

Each time we evaluate the latest frontier learning language models (LLMs), we see continued improvement in their ability to understand and apply legal documents. But this progress also raises a parallel responsibility: ensuring that the humans guiding these systems recognise contracts as tools for delivering planet-positive outcomes. More than ever, we need to ensure that what is produced through these interactions translates into real climate benefit, rather than drifting into well-formatted but empty or misleading “greenwashed” legal output.

Our editorial expertise is well established. We have years of experience [writing this content](https://chancerylaneproject.org/clauses/), working with businesses to implement it, and doing the hard yards of maintaining and [documenting its impact.](https://chancerylaneproject.org/case-studies/)

We are well placed to benchmark climate commitments in contracts and assess whether they are truly effective. We see benchmarking as both a way to evaluate existing work and to improve what comes next. This creates a virtuous cycle. Each assessment sharpens our standards, stronger standards improve our benchmarks, and better benchmarks raise the quality of the legal documents produced from our content. Those documents can then be measured against the same benchmarks, continuously improving the system over time.

Upstream of legal document creation, we are building tools to support sustainability leads, procurement teams, and general counsel in demonstrating the value of climate-aligned contracting and how it can be embedded within existing business processes. Downstream, we help lawyers assess the legal practicality and impact of the climate-aligned language they have used, as well as how it sits within broader global legal frameworks, laws, and standards.

### **How we got here**

We developed minimum viable AI tool prototypes and tested them directly with real users. Grounded in [Lean methodology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_startup) and user-centred [design principles](https://www.nngroup.com/articles/lean-ux-agile-study-guide/), we prioritised rapid learning over polished outputs. Rather than long development cycles, we built just enough to validate whether our assumptions held with the people who would ultimately use the solutions on TCLP Labs.

_This work is funded by_ _the_ [Partick J McGovern Foundation](https://www.mcgovern.org/) and _built in partnership with_ [_Unboxed_](https://unboxed.co/)_._

Between January and March 2026, we ran structured research sessions with lawyers, procurement strategists, legal tech vendors and researchers across six countries and three continents. Each session was built around three hypotheses we wanted to stress-test.

**Benchmarking over browsing.** Giving professionals a way to measure their contracts against recognised external standards would prove more useful than a content library. Confirmed. Every participant engaged more readily with a score and a gap list than with clause browsing.

**The content is the differentiator.** What legal tech partners can’t readily replicate is TCLP’s credible, climate-aligned content, which has been built over the years and maintained by our practitioners. Participants consistently looked past the interface to what was underneath it. One legal tech professional put it plainly: the tool shows two clauses side by side. What he actually needs is the difference – the minimum change required to reach alignment, without discarding the language his client spent months negotiating. For him, too much interface is just noise. The content – and the core differences and changes are the signal. How we can surface those critical changes helps a busy professional understand at a glance how applying TCLP’s content is achievable.

**Rough prototypes can open real conversations.** We wanted to know whether putting unfinished tools in front of senior professionals would produce meaningful feedback or just polite dismissal. We found that participants engaged closely with the MVPs and the functionality of TCLP Labs. But these sessions did more than generate insight; they turned participants into ambassadors for TCLP’s content and ways of working. The research was also relationship-building, and that changes how we think about the next phase.

> _“Your project can serve as a guardian of these things. A non-profit with this depth of knowledge can give people something they badly need – approval, and peace of mind.”_ Legal designer, Czech Republic, February 2026.

### **What we learned**

It’s clear now that vendors and end users want quite different things from the same tool. An in-house lawyer acting for charities didn’t disagree with the tool’s recommendations, but asked – What if it offered a range? High ambition, middling, lightweight. Something she could use to understand compromises. A procurement strategist working at scale told us her problem isn’t a lack of standards, but a surfeit of them. She saw that the tool could bypass standards-heavy thinking and embed climate ambition directly into contracts, without requiring the user to think about it, which aligns exactly with our ambition.

Our research clarified the realities of climate-aligned contracting across procurement and legal workflows, and identified three distinct problems that TCLP is positioned to address.

The first is an output problem. Benchmarking proved more useful than browsing a content library. But a score on its own isn’t enough; it tells you where you are, not what to do next. Shareable summaries, exportable arguments, and suggested redlines are some of the features that could make the difference between a tool that changes practice and one that enables greenwashing.

The second is an ambition problem. The tools currently speak in one voice: maximum ambition. But a modest clause that gets into a contract is worth more than an ambitious one that doesn’t. A range of ambition doesn’t dilute our mission; it engages with it pragmatically and doesn’t ignore the long tail of impact opportunities.

The third is a trust problem. Participants weren’t sceptical of the tools. They were professional. They needed to sell their decisions to others. A recommendation with no visible reasoning doesn’t reassure a professional. What they need is the ability to trace a recommendation back to a specific standard, a specific clause, a specific piece of reasoning. That’s a core feature of our tools.

### **The infrastructure underneath**

We are building the answer to the infrastructure problem identified in our research.

Alongside the TCLP Labs tools, we are developing a knowledge graph of TCLP’s legal content, a structured, machine-readable model of our clause library, the standards it references, and the relationships between them. We have written about this work before. What is new is what sits alongside it: a GraphRAG API that enables graph-based retrieval, querying the knowledge graph rather than simply searching text, so legal tools can reason over TCLP content directly, not just retrieve it.

This takes time to build well, and we are deliberately not rushing it. The next iteration of prototypes on TCLP Labs is already drawing on early versions of this infrastructure. What comes next is making that foundation available to partners. We are in active conversations with legal tech vendors who want climate-aligned content embedded in their tools, procurement platforms that need standards-based contract intelligence, and lawyers working at the intersection of contracting tools and climate ambition.

TCLP has always had legal credibility. What we are building now is the technical credibility to sit alongside it, not because we want to become a legal tech company, but because the field needs a non-profit at the infrastructure layer. Each prototype is designed for practitioners who want to do the right thing but do not yet have the tools to do it easily. We aim to make these tools the default choice.

### **Work with us**

We are looking for three things.

**Legal tech partners** who want to integrate climate-aligned contract intelligence into their tools. We have the content layer and the infrastructure direction. We want to build on both together.

**Practitioners** – lawyers, procurement leads and sustainability professionals who want to test the Labs tools and tell us where they fall short.

**Funders and research partners** who are ready to back the next phase: moving from promising to proven.

[Sign up here to collaborate](https://forms.chancerylaneproject.org/s/registration?event=701N100000d1vnO#register-for-chancery-lane-project-event)