.legal Wrapped 2025 - The Year in Review on the .legal Platform 🍾

We're approaching the end of 2025. A year that's flown by, at least that's how it feels at .legal. But it's just calendar time that's felt quick, because when we tally up the year, there's really been a lot happening at .legal on the product side.

Over the past few years, I've made it a habit to do a brief summary of the year that's passed. Inspired by various streaming services and the like, here's .legal wrapped 2025 – enjoy.

The big headline for 2025 must be: One Unified GRC Platform – we've reached two important milestones in that regard. We've launched our Frameworks, which have made the platform much stronger in areas like IT security and cybersecurity. And we've created a new generation of our contract management software (better known as Pactius), which means contracts are now part of the .legal platform, and officially we only have one product on the shelf, albeit with many modules and add-ons.

Our history has meant we've been in a position of having several different products on the shelf – and that's why it's really great to be able to say that we've now reached a point where we have one unified compliance platform that's being used by nearly 400 customers for many different purposes. This means that today we're at a place where we not only have a unified platform, but it's also been stress-tested by over 10,000 users.

2025 in Releases

But what exactly have we built in 2025? I'll take you through that in the overview below. Here, you'll also get some insight into key figures from the use of some of the features. Finally, I'll get out the crystal ball and look a bit into what you can expect to happen next year.

This year, we've made a full 23 new releases to the platform. That's slightly fewer than last year, but still close to our target of a release every other week. There have been releases of a larger nature, such as launching a completely new module. There have been releases of a smaller nature, minor changes to the platform based on user feedback. And then there are the more technical releases. Not all of these are interesting in a summary like this, so I've chosen a selection of the features that have provided the most value.

Task Creation from Anywhere in the Platform

We started the year by making collaboration in the .legal platform easier. We did this in part by introducing the ability to create standalone tasks from different parts of the system and even relate a task to, for example, an asset, a process, or a policy.

We previously had a problem where tasks could only exist in the platform if they had a relation to the annual wheel. But that's not necessarily something all tasks need. So this also provided new and extra possibilities regarding when and how you use tasks in the platform.

You can read more about standalone tasks here.

Reference and Tag Functionality
Another collaboration feature we introduced was our new module for referencing and linking to documentation and users in the platform. It's a feature that's been introduced in all our "description fields" across the platform. But we see it used most on tasks/annual wheel activities. It's an especially useful feature when you're working with tasks that need to be delegated. When you describe how the task should be solved, it's a great advantage to be able to link directly to, for example, the policy that needs to be revised. Or the ability to tag a user in a comment, who then gets an email notification immediately that you need their help.

This way, the platform suddenly becomes much more dynamic, and you can structure your documentation cross-wise in a very flexible manner.

See more details about relations and tags here.

A New Generation of .legal Contracts

As I teased a bit at the beginning, the launch of a completely new contract module has been one of the major milestones in 2025. Since we merged with Pactius several years ago, we've been running Pactius Contract Management as a standalone product for contracts. There have also been lots of happy customers on Pactius, so that wasn't why we needed to change anything.

But Pactius was becoming rather dated, and that set limitations on new development. Additionally, we can see that what we're good at with contracts – "Contract Compliance" – is moving closer and closer to our domain of digital compliance, when we're talking about things like NIS2 and DORA, for example. And that ultimately means that contract functionalities will fit perfectly with our goal of a unified compliance platform.

Therefore, we made the decision to rebuild the contract module from scratch. This time in our compliance platform. After launching Vendor Management last year, which phased out the DPA Service product, this was the final step on the journey towards one unified compliance platform, which has now become a reality.

And the new contract module has turned out really great. The first version was about getting an overview of your contracts. Creation, storage, and overview. Here, we could draw heavily on how Pactius did things, because that part worked well there. But at the same time, we could take advantage of the new features, design, etc., that the platform enables.

Read more about the year's first contract release here.

Quick Search and Documentation Creation + Vendor Risk Report

Sometimes we launch big features like a new contract module. Other times we launch smaller things that have been requested by our users. We usually bundle them together where we launch a "bundle" of different features at once. We did one such bundle at the end of March, and from that, I think it's worth mentioning a couple of features that were received really well.

Global search across all documentation in the platform. It was perhaps the kind of feature you didn't know you needed until it was there. But we can see that global search has become a huge hit and a completely natural part of using the platform. Along with this, we created "quick creation" of new documentation, so our users can now create a new system, policy, or task wherever they are in the platform.

In the same release, we launched a risk report where you can, across all the classifications you've made on vendors or the audits you've conducted on vendors, get a unified risk picture and see how risk is distributed. This report was designed in close collaboration with one of our customers but now lives and provides value to everyone using the Vendor Management module, and that's where product development together with customers really comes into its own.


You can read more about this package of new features here.

Retrieve Company Information Directly from CVR

2025 also became the year when we launched our very first standard integration. Namely, a standard integration with CVR, so when you create new legal entities, you can retrieve company information directly from there. This is certainly not our only standard integration in the pipeline, as we'll be launching many more of this kind. Our platform isn't built to solve all the world's problems, so it makes really good sense for us to create integrations where it's easy to use other tools that solve other tasks that work well in conjunction with our domain.

Read more about the CVR integration here.

Frameworks, Frame-works, ISMS – Many Names for the Same Thing

The other major launch in 2025 was our completely new framework module. And what a reception it's had. I'm still overwhelmed today by how positive the feedback has been around this particular module – sometimes you just hit the mark.

We had previously built a declarations module that could help us with our own declarations at .legal. We then launched this module in a customer-facing version, without many people actually using it. On the other hand, we could see many more possibilities in that module – so we built further on it and launched our Framework module from it. This module doesn't just help you get declarations sorted. It powers up your entire control apparatus across different IT security standards and legal regulations.

It provides both a good overview of your progress regarding different legal regulations. At the same time, you avoid tedious duplication of work. It also becomes easier to delegate tasks in the organisation, so compliance starts to become a collaborative effort.

Frameworks was launched as a new module. But it's already been rolled out to many of our existing customers and new customers. In this way, the module has quickly become a success, and I think that's because it's the module that ties things together and gives you an overview of the increased requirements for digital compliance.

Read more about the launch of frameworks here.

Contract Obligations – First Extension of the Contract Module

The first launch of the new contract module was obviously only the first step on the journey. Our ambition from the beginning was to be able to move all our contract customers from Pactius to the new module. That's why the roadmap has also been somewhat driven by this, as it was important that the new platform could handle the same use cases as Pactius.

One of these was an obligations engine, so you can manage your obligations on your contracts and the responsible person can be notified by email at important deadlines. We utilised our already existing annual wheel and task management to handle the obligations. So not only does the new module now support the same functions as Pactius, it's actually also been improved – as we were gifted lots of smart functionality from other parts of the platform.

Read more about obligations here.

Contract Access Management

One of the central things when you're working digitally with your contracts is that you have the ability to control who has access to see the contract. It's important that a user can't accidentally snoop around in contracts.

Therefore, access management for the new contract module has naturally been a focus. We've already implemented access management in the compliance platform, so this wasn't entirely new. But one of the requests we often received, when you give access to a contract based on a business area, for example, was to be able to get a summary of all users with access to the contract based on all the different permission options. And we solved that with the new access tab.

Read more about contract access management here.

Build Your Own Contract Templates

There's a big difference in which metadata makes sense to register on an NDA agreement versus a large service agreement. Therefore, contract templates are an essential part of your work with contracts. The function that existed in our older contract module wasn't perfect, so we chose to give this particular part a major overhaul.

Here, the focus has been on opening up so that admins can easily create and update templates. Including, among other things, creating new custom fields. Because whilst we can create plenty of standard .legal fields, there will still be cases where a customer needs something that lies outside the "standard". That's why it was really great to be able to launch a highly flexible module for creating and maintaining both contract templates and custom fields.

You can read more about the launch of contract templates here.

New Filtering and Views

On a platform like .legal's, regardless of what you use the platform for, you'll end up with long lists with lots of data. That's natural, as it's a documentation platform. And the more detailed these lists are, the more you probably have control of your things. So it's not a negative thing. But it does require that you can also easily search information and find exactly the information you need.

And with the contract module, it gave us an opportunity to rethink how search, display, and filtering can be set up. We think we created a really lovely user interface for this particular task, which also provides great flexibility in searching and getting an overview.

We're actually so pleased with the new way of doing things that we'll be introducing the same functionality across the other modules in the platform during next year.

You can see how it works and read more about filtering etc. here.

CIS18 Framework

CIS18 got its own release. It actually fits under frameworks as previously written about. And we launch frameworks continuously and one at a time. The same applies to CIS18. But we made a series of updates specifically to be able to launch CIS18 – so the setup in .legal can now reflect both implementation groups, security functions, and a new evaluation engine.

You can read more about the CIS18 framework updates here.

Style Your Descriptions and Emails

Nice things just work better. And with a bit of styling, the message often becomes a bit more accessible to the recipient.

And if you need to perform a security check and receive a task from a compliance platform – when are you most likely to solve it? If it's just a long flat text? Or if someone has taken the time to divide it into headings, body text, bullets, and links?

The answer is probably the latter – and that's why we chose to develop some new features in the platform, so you can now work with "rich text" in all description fields. This could be in a task description, for example.

At the same time, we provided the ability for you to style parts of the emails sent from the .legal platform yourself, so you can make communication to your colleagues, vendors, etc., more meaningful for your company.

You can read more about these styling features here.

Document Search with OCR

A large part of using .legal is registering the right metadata. This could be important and central information in a contract. It could be information from a vendor audit. Or it could be the essentials from the information security policy that you need to remember to follow up on regularly.

But you'll never succeed in documenting all information as metadata. It's simply an overwhelming task. That's why the platform is naturally built around you registering the most important metadata and then uploading the document, so you have those things together.

With document search, you can now search documents across the platform. So you go from being able to search metadata to now being able to search everything. Document search has also been created with OCR, so you can also search scanned documents and images.

Read more about document search here.

Penneo Integration

As mentioned earlier, the ambition is to create a series of standard integrations for the .legal platform. And the Penneo integration became the second one. It makes it possible to easily connect your .legal and Penneo accounts and import signed contracts from Penneo directly into .legal.

This release helps underscore our plan that we shouldn't be the world's best at everything. In other words, we should be the best at digital compliance and have one unified platform for those tasks. And then our platform should work together with other tools that are good at what they do – and Penneo is a perfect example here. That's why we're pleased to be able to introduce this standard integration that our joint customers can now benefit from.

Read more about the Penneo integration here.

And Everything Else

I'm choosing to stop highlighting features now. I could have kept going, because this is really just a selection. It says something about how much development can be achieved in a calendar year. Because there are many other great features I haven't mentioned at all, such as: Choose start page, display of controls on tasks, flexible modification of task frequencies – and I could go on.

Check all our product updates on our product blog here.

And remember, you can always get the latest news directly in your inbox by signing up for our updates here.

What About Next Year?

We have big plans. And we always have more ideas than we can execute. But in broad terms, we'll be working on the following next year:

AI Is Moving In

AI is the big headline here. We have the platform, we've laid the pipes – so the next step is that we'll be launching various AI features in the platform.

We think we're in a strong position on this point, as we're not becoming a pure AI platform. We can actually go into an already existing platform structure and create AI functionality precisely where it helps. This could be, for example, onboarding a contract and extracting relevant metadata, comparing a document against a golden standard, or getting help justifying your risk assessments.

ERM – Working with Risk in the Bigger Picture

We're going to expand our risk module so that it becomes an Enterprise Risk Management module going forward. We're already in the process of thinking big thoughts about how we can make risk work more flexible, but hopefully also easier – within several different digital compliance areas, but also up to an Enterprise level ultimately.

Management Reporting

We have so much data in our platform. And the operational part works really well. But it's not always this level that management needs to see information at. That's why management reporting is an important element of your compliance work. And admittedly, our platform could work better here. That's why we'll also be introducing several different new management reports in the platform.

And we'll be designing them with input from our users. So if you fancy talking to me about management reporting and your needs, you're very welcome to get in touch with me.

You can see the full product roadmap here.

Thanks for a great year – and thanks for using the .legal platform. We're already looking forward to next year and all the exciting features we'll be launching there.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from Johannes and the rest of the .legal team 🎄🎆