Harness
An open standard for encoding legal workflows as deterministic, auditable processes.
What Harness Is
Harness is a specification for structuring legal work as reproducible workflows. It defines three core primitives — Templates, Notations, and State Machines — that together encode the full lifecycle of a legal matter from intake to delivery.
Any legal professional can adopt Harness. The format is plain Markdown and YAML. No proprietary software required.
Core Components
Templates
A Template is a single Markdown file that contains three things: a client questionnaire, a staff review workflow, and a document body. Document bodies use Liquid templating — questionnaire answers are substituted at render time to produce the final document.
# Nevada LLC Formation
## Questionnaire
- What is the name of your LLC?
- Who are the initial members?
- What is the registered agent address?
## Workflow
1. Review questionnaire responses
2. Verify name availability
3. File Articles of Organization
4. Deliver operating agreement
## Document Body
This Operating Agreement of {{ llc_name }}...Notations
A Notation is a live instance of a Template — one per client engagement. It holds the client's questionnaire answers and tracks the current lifecycle state.
Notation lifecycle states: open → waiting_for_questionnaire → review → waiting_for_workflow → closed
State Machines
State Machines define the valid transitions between Notation states. They are finite paths with explicit entry conditions, preventing a Notation from skipping required steps or moving backward unexpectedly.
Questionnaires and workflows are each modeled as their own state machine, running in sequence. A Notation cannot advance to the review state until all questionnaire fields are complete.
File Structure
harness/ ├── templates/ │ ├── nv-llc.md │ ├── living-trust.md │ └── power-of-attorney.md ├── notations/ │ ├── <notation-id>.yaml │ └── ... └── harness.yaml # schema version + config
Benefits by Stakeholder
Legal Professionals
Standardized workflows reduce errors, speed up delivery, and create a defensible audit trail for every matter.
Organizations
Harness templates encode institutional knowledge — onboard new staff faster and maintain quality as you scale.
Clients
Clear state tracking means clients always know where their matter stands and what happens next.
The Legal Industry
An open standard enables interoperability between tools, reducing vendor lock-in and lowering the cost of legal technology.
Technical Requirements
- •Templates are UTF-8 Markdown files with YAML front matter
- •Notation state is stored as YAML with ISO 8601 timestamps
- •Document bodies use Liquid template syntax for variable substitution
- •State machine definitions are expressed in YAML
- •No runtime dependency on Harness tooling — any Markdown and YAML parser works
Get Started with Harness
The full specification and reference implementation are on GitHub.
View on GitHub