Inspiration

I signed up for this hackathon knowing absolutely nothing about the loan industry. I'm a developer - I understand APIs and databases, not syndicated lending. But I started asking around - talking to people who actually work in this space - and I kept hearing the same thing: loan deals are being negotiated by emailing Word documents back and forth.

Everyone had horror stories about version confusion, missed approvals, and deals getting delayed because nobody could figure out what was actually agreed. I kept thinking - we have Git for code, Figma for design, why are lawyers still playing email ping-pong with critical documents?

I didn't want to build some generic solution that would just sit unused. So I studied existing legal tech platforms like Alfa, Clarilis, and KLS to understand what actually makes legal tech successful in practice. That's when I realised this isn't just a document problem - it's a workflow problem.

What it does: Git for Legal

Accord is the answer to the question: What if legal documents had a Pull Request system? It transforms a messy conversation into a structured career readiness pipeline for a deal. Instead of "See attached for my edits," Accord provides a centralised command centre for borrower counsel, arranger counsel, and lenders:

The Single Source of Truth: One live document. No more "Final_v2_REVISED_v3.docx."

Issues Over Chaos: Changes aren't just "edits"; they are Proposals. Each change is an "Issue" that requires a specific person’s digital sign-off.

The Audit Trail: Every decision, who approved the interest rate change, when, and why, is logged automatically.

Execution Readiness: A dashboard that shows exactly which clauses are contested and who is currently blocking the deal from closing.

Challenges:

The biggest hurdle wasn't the code, it was the vocabulary. I had to learn the "language of loans" from scratch to ensure Accord didn't feel like a toy.

The "Goldilocks" Workflow: If I made it too rigid (like strict Git), lawyers would hate it. If I made it too loose (like Google Docs), it wouldn't solve the accountability problem. Finding that "just right" balance of structure was a constant pivot.

Security & Permissions: In a multi-party negotiation, "transparency" is a double-edged sword. I had to build a robust permissions engine so that certain internal discussions remain private while the "Proposed Change" is visible to the whole syndicate.

Built With

• google-documentai
• next.js
• nextjs
• supabase
• typescript