How the GitHub legal team used Copilot CLI to streamline their workflows

GitHub's legal team—lawyers, program managers, business professionals, but no software engineers—recently used Copilot CLI to build two production tools, per the GitHub Blog. The first, built by product counsel Ngandu Kasuku, is a contract drafting assistant called terms-ai. It organizes approved agreements and a plain-language style guide in a repository, cutting Kasuku's review and drafting time roughly in half while making contracts more consistent and clearer. The second tool, from online safety counsel Jesse Geraci, automates legal workflows including DMCA analysis, contract review, NDA triage, and compliance checks. It evolved from plain-language instruction files into a full desktop app where legal teams customize behavior through readable Markdown. Both lawyers emphasized that you don't need to be a developer or wait for a software vendor to operationalize your own methodology. If you can clearly define what you do, Copilot CLI makes it straightforward to build the fix.

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