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Use cases/Franchising & licensing
Franchise agreements,
handled by agents.
The business gets its franchise pack back the same day, with the open questions already asked. Your lawyers sign off a short list of flagged decisions instead of assembling 80 page agreements.
Already live at two global hotel groups.
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Schedule 2 · Term and development
commencing on [ANTICIPATED OPENING DATE, TO BE CONFIRMED] and continuing for the initial term set out in clause 4.1
the obligations of the Franchisee guaranteed by [PARENT GUARANTEE, AWAITING YOUR DECISION] pursuant to the joinder at schedule 9
Arrived in the same emailJoinderDevelopment addendumComfort letter
A Word document in your own template, in your lawyer's inbox. Everything the agent could not resolve is highlighted, so the first thing a reviewer sees is the short list of decisions that are actually theirs. Screens are illustrative and use fictional deal data.
01 · How it works
From request to pack, without the fetching.
A request that used to become a lawyer's afternoon becomes an email. The agent watches the mailbox development already writes to, pulls the deal itself, and drafts the agreement together with everything the deal triggers. Nobody forwards anything and nobody re-keys anything.
Riverside Hotel Group, approved, please can we have the docs
Hi both, Riverside went through committee on Thursday. Could we get the franchise pack drawn up? Everything is on the opportunity.
Flank agent picks it up
Matches the request to the Riverside opportunity in your deal system · 2 min
What the agent went and got
Signed MOUdeal record
Committee approval, 14 Augustdeal record
Brand, tier and territorydeal record
Fee schedule and key money positiondeal record
Ownership structureattachments
Drafting agent
I have the Riverside deal and can draft the pack. Two things are not resolved on the record.
1There is no anticipated opening date, which the term and the development schedule both depend on.
2The franchisee is a special purpose vehicle and no parent guarantee is recorded. Shall I include a joinder?
Answer in a reply, or open a form that is already filled in with everything the agent found. Drafting resumes as soon as it hears back.
The pack comes back
Agreement plus the ancillaries the deal triggers, open points highlighted
Missing or contradictory facts produce a question, never a silent guess. Where the agent cannot resolve a value, it returns a highlighted placeholder rather than an assumption. Your lawyer confirms; they do not re-key.
02 · What changes
The same deal, before and after.
The same documents still go out, to the same standard, signed off by the same lawyers. What changes is who does the assembly, and what your legal team spends its day on.
Today
×Field the request, then go into the deal system to find the opportunity and its attachments
×Find the closest precedent and work out what to change
×Select clause variants by hand across brand, tier, territory and deal type
×Remember which ancillaries this deal type triggers, and draft each one
×Chase missing facts across email threads
×Re-key the agreed terms into the deal system after signing
×Staff a review team to catch what all of the above gets wrong
With agents
✓The agent takes the request from development and pulls the deal itself
✓Legal is involved when there is a decision to make, not to fetch and copy
✓Receive the full pack, drafted from your templates and playbook
✓Review the highlighted exceptions, not the whole document
✓Let the agent write the final position back to your deal system
✓Keep your lawyers on the judgment, not the assembly
03 · The ceiling
Where template automation stops.
Most franchisors already generate documents out of their deal system, and for clean mail-merge letters it works. The problem is not the tool. It is that the tool has a ceiling, and the ceiling sits far below where franchise drafting actually lives: clause variants that depend on brand, tier, territory, deal type and ownership structure all at once, across an 80 to 100 page document.
Below the ceiling · keep it there
•Standard letters where every field maps cleanly to a record in the deal system
•Straight mail-merge with no conditional logic
•Single documents, requested one at a time
•Works fine, and some of it should keep running there
Above the ceiling · agents take it
•Data that lives outside the deal system: ownership structures in documents and org charts
•Clause variants that depend on several deal facts at once
•Variable and layered schedules, regional riders and packs
•Multi-document packs where one request triggers several instruments
•Until now, all of it fell back to qualified lawyers, one document at a time
What the ceiling costs downstream
One global franchisor staffed a dedicated review team just to catch errors in its own paper: mistakes in the contract, mistakes in the deal record, and mismatches between the two. The function paid for its drafting twice, once to produce it and once to check it. When an organisation builds a permanent team to catch the errors its tooling produces, the tooling has stopped being automation and become a source of work.
04 · Results
What your legal function gets back.
The value lands in four places: where your lawyers' time goes, how long the business waits for its documents, how consistent the estate is, and whether the record can be trusted without a team checking it.
Lawyer time back on judgment
Counsel opens a draft to resolve a short list of flagged points, not to build an 80 to 100 page agreement clause by clause. The work that needs a lawyer still gets one; the work that never did, does not.
Documents without the queue
Requests from development no longer wait on a lawyer being free to fetch the deal and start drafting. The pack comes back the same day, with the open questions already asked.
One standard, applied identically
The same clause logic runs on the fortieth agreement as on the first, in every territory. Consistency stops depending on who drafted it and how their week was going.
An error-catching team with nothing to catch
One client staffed a team to find drafting and record-keeping errors, the cost of tooling that could not be trusted. Its target for this deployment: that team should find nothing. The client set that bar, not us.
Same day
the pack is back with development, open questions already asked
~50
drafting tasks taken off lawyers' desks, from a handful at launch
80–100
pages per agreement that nobody on your team assembles by hand any more
300+
lawyers in the legal function this runs inside today
This has run in production at a global hospitality group since 2025, now in its second year with a remit that has grown from the core franchise pack to the whole document estate, and at a second global hotel group on a different standard form. Hotels are where the pattern matured, not where it stops: the same paper profile recurs wherever franchising or licensing happens at scale, with high volume, heavy templating, rule-based drafting logic, and expensive people doing the assembly.
Hospitality
Food service
Fitness
Retail
Automotive
Convenience & fuel
Brand licensing
05 · Getting live
Live in weeks, with your experts in the loop.
There is nothing for your lawyers to install and nothing to learn beyond an email address. Flank carries the project management; your experts contribute two short sessions a week.
Weeks 1 to 2
Highest impact first
We start with the documents that hurt most and whose data you already have, so something useful is live in the first weeks. Two to four weeks from contract to production is the norm across our deployments.
Weeks 2 to 8
Your experts, two short sessions a week
Thirty minutes to choose and talk through templates, thirty to review what we built, batches overlapping. A full template estate ingests in six to eight weeks.
Then
Expand sideways
Next region, next brand, next document family, then the connection to your deal system in both directions: drafting from the record, and writing the agreed position back to it.
Deployment and security
Inside your security perimeter from day one. A dedicated tenant in your chosen region, zero data retention with model providers, single sign-on and MFA, and a full audit trail behind every request, question and draft.
06 · The whole platform
Drafting is the entry point, not the limit.
The licensing function is more than the drafting. The same supervised agents run the rest of it on one platform, and each piece keeps the others current.
Drafting
The franchise pack on this page is one example. The same drafting agents run SoWs, NDAs and the rest of your templated paper.
Read more about drafting →
Review
First-round review of third-party paper against your playbook, with deviations quarantined for a lawyer to decide.
See the use cases →
Negotiation support
Agents prepare positions and redlines across the back and forth. Your lawyers make the calls.
See the use cases →
Intake & triage
One front door for everything the business sends legal, routed by your thresholds and risk rules.
Legal front door →
Repository
Every executed agreement filed at signature and written back to your deal system, so the record and the contract stop drifting apart.
Flank Record →
FAQ
Template automation handles the mail-merge end of franchise paper well, and some of it should keep running there. What it cannot do is choose between clause variants that depend on each other, use facts that live outside your deal system, or assemble a multi-document pack. That is the work that has always fallen back to qualified lawyers, and it is the work the agents take on.
The franchise agreement and its principal ancillaries are the usual starting point: joinders, development addenda, comfort letters. From there the scope grows to the whole estate: terminations for changes of ownership, change letters, financing documents and regional packs. At our anchor client, approximately 50 drafting tasks are in scope, from a handful at launch.
The supervision is built into the output. Missing or contradictory inputs produce a question, never a silent guess. Every value the agent cannot resolve arrives in the Word document as a highlighted placeholder. Departures from your standard form are collected in a special terms schedule, so a reviewer sees at a glance how far a deal has drifted. And every request, question and draft is on the audit trail. Counsel signs off every document; what changed is what sign-off means.
If your deals produce several documents each, your deal data lives in a system, and qualified people assemble the pack, the pattern applies. Hotels are where it matured, and hotel franchise agreements are among the more demanding documents in commercial practice, which makes them a strong proof rather than a soft one. The same profile recurs in food service, fitness, retail, automotive, convenience and fuel, and brand licensing.
Inside your security perimeter. Deployment is a dedicated tenant in your chosen region, with zero data retention with model providers, single sign-on and MFA, and Exchange integration for the mailbox. Administrators see a full audit trail of every request, question and draft, so the legal function can evidence how each document was produced.
Two to four weeks from contract to production is the norm, starting with the documents that hurt most. A full template estate ingests in six to eight weeks, built with your own experts in two thirty-minute sessions a week and with Flank carrying the project management.
