How to set up and run an EMI scheme
A practical guide to EMI options for UK startups: the 2026 rule changes, eligibility, the £250k limit, HMRC valuations and filings, and how to run it all without the admin headache.
Blog
Practical articles on contract management, cap tables and employee equity, written by the lawyers and product people behind GAIA for in-house legal, finance and HR teams.
Agentic AI in Contract Management: From "Show Me Everything" to "Only Tell Me What Matters"
This article argues that visibility was never the real goal in contract management. The first wave of AI made contracts extracted, tagged, and searchable, but left all the reading and judging on your desk, so a tidier dashboard was still a pile of work. Agentic AI changes the category by taking on the first pass of the judgment itself: reviewing a contract against a standard you define and surfacing only what crosses a line, so the output is less to look at, not more, with the human moved from first-pass reader to second-pass judge. It maps where this holds and where it doesn't, which contracts it earns its keep on, the limits worth weighing before you trust it, and how GAIA's Playbooks put the "flag, don't show" model into practice.
Delegating Legal Work: How In-House Teams Can Hand Routine Tasks to Non-Legal Staff
Learn why hiring more lawyers is the wrong default when your legal team is drowning, and what actually separates teams that scale gracefully from those stuck reviewing the same NDA for the hundredth time. Discover a four-part test for identifying delegation candidates, five concrete areas where in-house teams are already pushing legal work into the business. This includes NDAs and standard contracts to DSARs, and HR paperwork. Find out about the practical rollout principles that determine whether legal self-service actually sticks or quietly reverts within six months.
How much equity should you give your employees?
How much equity to reserve for employees: option-pool size by stage, grants by role and seniority, vesting and dilution norms, based on published guidance from Index Ventures and Balderton Capital.
Data Residency vs Data Sovereignty: Choosing an LLM Provider for EU Contract Data
EU data residency and EU data sovereignty aren't the same thing. Under the US CLOUD Act, who controls your LLM provider — not where its servers sit — decides who can reach your contract data. A practical guide for in-house legal teams, plus the honest trade-off of going fully European.
Contract Management System: What to Look For in 2026
This article gets at the oldest problem in contract management, the fact that capturing an agreement was never the hard part but keeping it always was: why legacy CLM was really just storage that left the intelligence to you and a stack of stale spreadsheets, what changes once agentic AI can read, reason, and act on a contract, how GAIA holds the whole lifecycle from creation to termination in one source of truth, the intelligence that lives with each contract and tracks every amendment and obligation, the calendar agent that even calculates the auto-renewal deadlines a contract never spelled out, and the shift from surfacing every field to showing only what matters, with Playbooks reviewing incoming contracts against your own gold standard.
What is a Contract Playbook
This article untangles what a contract playbook actually is: The judgment layer, not the template or the clause library, the five things every good entry captures (preferred position, ranked fallbacks, hard lines, escalation triggers, and the rationale in plain language), the traffic-light system that lets anyone navigate a clause without a lawyer, why paper playbooks fall short on judgment, admin, and upkeep, and how GAIA Insights builds and runs one from your own paper.
LLMs for In-House Legal Work: A Practical Playbook
This article breaks down the legal workflows with LLMs that pay off fastest, the prompting habits that make outputs reliable, the confidentiality and verification rules that keep AI-assisted work defensible under the EU AI Act and GDPR, and an honest comparison of where Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot each fit.
Best Cap Table Software for German Startups (2026)
The four cap table platforms worth evaluating for a German GmbH in 2026: GAIA, Ledgy, Carta, and Story.law Aegis, and where each genuinely fits.
Equity That Keeps People: Hiring, Motivation, and Retention
Why equity is one of the most effective levers European companies have for winning and keeping talent, and what Germany's § 19a reform changes about the calculation.
What to Expect from Your Equity Management Provider
What the right equity management provider does for you, who relies on it, where equity administration goes wrong, and the questions worth asking before you c…
Understanding Convertible Loans: A Comprehensive Guide for Startups
A guide to convertible loans as a hybrid financing instrument for early-stage startups, covering how they work, their advantages, and key terms to negotiate.