We publish our wordings.
Dozens of Australian agencies redraft substantially the same professional indemnity and D&O clauses. That is deadweight cost with zero differentiation — so we published ours, open and versioned like software, free to use with your capacity provider’s approval.
The library
Eight financial-lines wordings, published as HTML and as Word originals.
The library is served from a public GitHub repository, so that every change to a wording is a tracked, reviewable diff rather than a new file in a shared drive. All eight are working drafts, marked DRAFT — SUBJECT TO LEGAL REVIEW — NOT FOR USE, and none may be issued or bound until Wording Partner sign-off.
Taking part
Two routes in, deliberately kept apart.
Anyone can comment on a wording — sign in with a GitHub login. If you would rather change the words themselves, a free GitHub account lets you edit the wording text directly in your browser and send the change to us; GitHub records which words you added or removed. Neither route changes a published wording on its own — a change is made only after review and sign-off, and is then released as a new version.
The argument
Markets have solved this before.
Derivatives markets did it with standard master agreements; the London market did it with a shared clause library. In both cases competition moved off the boilerplate and onto the things that differentiate a business — appetite, service and price. Nobody wins a risk because their definition of “professional services” is idiosyncratic; they just pay a lawyer to make it so.
A wording is infrastructure. Treating it like software — versioned, diffable, tested, published — makes it auditable in a way a Word document in a shared drive never is.
How it works
Versioned in public
Every wording carries a version. Changes are diffs with reasons, not silent replacements — so you can prove which words were on risk at the moment of bind.
Adversarially audited
Each wording is attacked before publication by a reader whose job is to find the hole — coverage gaps, circular definitions, orphaned defined terms. We publish the process; the findings stay in the workshop.
Yours to use
Free to adopt with your capacity provider’s approval, on an open licence. Adopting them is never a condition of using anything else we build.
Wording partners
Open wordings still need lawyers.
Publishing a wording removes the cost of drafting it from scratch — it does not remove the need for legal review against your appetite and capacity terms, or for counsel when a claim comes in. A panel of independent Australian insurance law firms familiar with the library — to be announced — is available to be engaged directly for wording and claims work on Commons-based policies. They do not endorse or stand behind the wordings; they are simply willing to work with them, for their own clients, on their own terms.
Open protocols
The language of the market belongs to the market.
The same principle applies to the rails. Australian commercial placement still moves over a proprietary, vendor-owned message rail designed in the EDI era. We intend to publish the venue’s placement protocols — lifecycle, message formats, schemas, and the Australian premium components (state duty, GST, emergency services levy, terrorism premium) as named, defined fields — openly and royalty-free, for anyone to implement, including our competitors. That grant would be made in the protocol documents themselves, is intended to survive a change of control and not to be withdrawn from documents already published; breaking changes would carry six months’ notice; and published mappings to established international standards mean nobody has to abandon what they already built.
Running code first: the protocol documents what the venue actually runs, and a change publishes as standard only after it operates in production — where document and venue disagree, the document gets corrected. Open protocols do not mean an open-source operator: the matching engine, the sealed-bid clearing mechanism and the ledger remain ours. The commitment is to the language of the market; the machinery that speaks it stays ours.
Where this is up to
The Meridian financial-lines suite is drafted and subject to legal review, and readable now under CC BY 4.0 — as drafts, not as wordings you can bind. The open-protocols grant sits in the protocol documents themselves, which publish at the venue’s go-live. Ask us for the current state and we will tell you.