Laravel Legal Documents Laravel Package

Product Decisions This Supports

• Whether to buy vs. build legal acceptance plumbing. The package covers versioned legal documents, immutable version IDs, and per-recipient acceptance records — the audit trail that legal/compliance will ask for. Deciding to adopt is a decision to not spend engineering time on document versioning, acceptance capture, and re-acceptance flows.
• Market and language expansion. v2.0.0 turns localization from a fork/hack into a configuration decision: source language stays authoritative, translations live in separate tables, and every stored translation is copied when a new version is cut. That makes "can we serve Bulgarian, then other locales?" a roadmap item rather than an engineering project.
• Compliance and audit requirements. Version copying is transactional and explicitly does not copy acceptances — meaning a new document version forces fresh acceptance. That is the correct legal posture and should be confirmed as your product policy, not discovered later.
• Risk-based sequencing on a major version. Spatie is no longer required, Filament integration targets Filament 4, and the Lara Zeus translation plugin is dropped. If you are mid-quarter on a Filament 3 admin or relying on Lara Zeus, this upgrade is a scheduled initiative, not a patch.
• Vendor-lock-in posture. The vendor-neutral TranslationDriver contract means you can start single-language (no migrations, no adapter, no Spatie) and add translation storage later without a data migration of source content.
• Degradation strategy. Single-language operation is supported even after Spatie is removed, and translation fallback is whole-document rather than mixed-language. Both are defensible product behaviors — a half-translated legal page is a legal risk, not a UX nicety.

When to Consider This Package

Consider it when:

• You ship terms, policies, DPAs, or similar documents that must be versioned and individually accepted, and you need a durable record of which version each user accepted.
• You are on Laravel 11–13 and can absorb a major-version upgrade with a published config/views review.
• You need a Filament admin surface for non-engineers to draft and publish document versions.
• You are single-language today but expect to add locales — the optional driver lets you defer the decision at near-zero cost.
• You want the compliance logic (fallback, version immutability, acceptance separation) resolved by a package rather than hand-rolled.

Look elsewhere when:

• Your admin panel is Filament 3 and cannot move to 4 on your timeline — the bundled integration does not target you, and you would be maintaining a fork.
• You require per-field or sentence-level translated fragments within a single document; the package deliberately does whole-document fallback.
• You need CMS-grade editorial workflow (draft/review/publish, approvals, scheduled publication) beyond versioning.
• You are on Laravel 10 or earlier — CI coverage starts at 11.
• You already run a document/contract lifecycle system (e.g., a CLM or e-signature vendor) and only need acceptance records; integrating with that system may be cheaper than a second source of truth.

How to Pitch It (Stakeholders)

For executives: v2.0.0 is a maturity release for the legal-documents component. It makes multilingual legal content a configuration choice instead of custom engineering, which directly supports expansion into non-English markets without a parallel build. It also strengthens the compliance story: every new document version is copied transactionally, translations included, while prior acceptances are deliberately not carried forward — so acceptance always refers to a version the user actually saw. The cost is a coordinated major upgrade: one dependency must now be declared explicitly, the admin integration requires Filament 4, and published configuration and views need review. There is no data conversion for single-language installations.

For engineering: Treat this as a planned upgrade, not a routine bump. Required actions: declare Spatie explicitly if used, republish and review config, Blade views, and language overrides against the new translation APIs and labels, and confirm the Filament 4 target against your admin build. Adding a language now requires explicit driver and source-language configuration plus the adapter's migrations — installing Spatie alone does nothing, which is the intended safety behavior. Fallback precedence is deliberate (Spatie's global fallback wins; package config applies only when unset or null) — document that so it isn't re-litigated. Validation covers Laravel 11–13, optional-dependency removal, MySQL 8, and PostgreSQL 16/18 with concurrency tests around version copies, locale writes, and serialization retry — the areas this release touches most. Confirm your database and Laravel versions are inside that matrix before scheduling.