No Nonsense Legal reads your deals and explains them in plain English, captures every split and gets it signed, tracks your sample clearances, and builds a living record of who made what and on what terms: the IP Ancestry Ledger. Yours to keep, and ready to hand to a lawyer the day you need one.
The deals that decide who owns your work get signed fast, often early, and almost always without anyone reading them closely. By the time it matters, the leverage is gone and the paper trail is missing.
NNL puts the legal layer back on your side: every deal read and explained in plain English, every split signed, every track on a living record of who made it and on what terms. You keep all of it. We do not lock your rights inside a platform. The record is yours to take anywhere.
The most common question is: what am I actually buying, and what happens? Here is every day of onboarding, exactly as it runs.
If you are an independent artist, producer, or small label with real catalog on the line and no full-time lawyer watching it, NNL is built around you. A couple of other creators fit it just as well.
Beats, masters, features, and sessions. Splits and samples piling up faster than the paperwork, deals signed on trust, and no single record of what you actually own. NNL runs the rights layer so you can keep making the work.
Co-writes, sessions, and publishing. Multiple splits per week, registrations that never quite get done, and royalties that depend on paperwork you have not had time to chase.
A catalog spread across several artists, steady deal flow, and reversion and registration windows nobody is formally tracking. One live record instead of a folder of PDFs and memory.
Fair question, and the one most people ask. Here is the straight answer, including where the alternatives are genuinely the better call.
Your contracts and your catalog are sensitive, and your leverage depends on keeping them that way. We build with that in mind, and we put the data terms in writing before you grant a single point of access. The specifics below are confirmed with you at intake and recorded in your file.
We request the minimum access needed for the work you approve, nothing more. Access is granted through your own accounts and can be revoked by you at any time, instantly, without our involvement.
Your rights record runs on accounts and tools you own and control: your own cloud accounts and a dedicated, access-controlled NNL workspace. We document exactly which third-party services touch your data and what each one sees.
Data is retained only as long as the work requires. Retention windows and a full deletion-on-request process are defined in writing: retained for the duration of your engagement and deleted within 30 days of a written request.
Before access is granted, we sign a mutual confidentiality agreement. AI processing of your contracts is governed by the no-training and data-handling terms documented in your file.
You're about to give someone access to your contracts and your rights. Here is who is on the other side of that. I'm Dave Taylor, also known as Switch. I'm a Grammy-nominated producer and a co-founder of Major Lazer, and I have spent two decades on the artist side of the exact deals NNL reads.
I have signed the agreements you sign. I have watched splits live and die in group chats, seen samples go uncleared, and learned the hard way that the time to understand a deal is before you sign it, not when the money shows up and the paperwork does not match.
No Nonsense Legal is the system I wished existed: read the deal, lock the split, record who made what, in language a creator actually reads, fast enough to keep up with the work. I build it for the people I came up with. I take a limited founding cohort, on purpose, and each rights record is built carefully rather than run off a template. That is why the founding rate exists, and why it will not last.
One living record for every track in your catalog: who made it, who owns it, what is cleared, and the proof behind each line. Representative interface, shown with illustrative data.
| Layer | What It Does | Deliverable To You |
|---|---|---|
Intelligence Rights Brief |
Surfaces what needs your attention: unsigned splits, clearance gaps, expiring options, and reversion windows. Everything else is recorded and queued. | Plain-English brief, on demand and on every upload |
Read Deal Reader (AI-assisted) |
Reads producer, sync, label, and collaboration deals and explains them in plain English. Flags the terms that matter and gives you plain-language talking points for your lawyer. | Plain-English deal summaries + flagged terms |
Provenance IP Ancestry Ledger |
A living record of every track: contributors, splits, samples, ownership, and the terms behind each one. The proof of who made what, and when. | Exportable rights record across your catalog |
Operations Splits & Clearance |
Captures splits and gets them signed while the session is fresh. Triages sample clearance and tracks every request to resolution. | Signed split sheets + clearance tracker |
Protection Reversion, Royalty & AI Rider |
Monitors reversion and registration windows so nothing lapses, and adds AI and likeness carve-outs to protect your voice and name. | Monitoring + alerts + AI/likeness rider language |
The full IP Ancestry Ledger for your catalog, exportable and yours permanently.
Every deal read, summarized, and flagged in plain English. One organized place.
Every collaborator and share captured and on the record, not in a group chat.
Alerts for reversion windows, registration gaps, expiring options, and new deals.
Your monthly plan keeps your rights record live and current: new deals read and explained, splits captured, clearance tracked, and reversion and registration windows monitored so nothing lapses. Month to month. Cancel anytime, and your rights record stays yours. Founding pricing is shared on the intake call.
Whether it pays for itself is arithmetic you can run before you ever talk to us. One master signed away with no reversion, one uncleared sample, or one unsigned split that turns into a dispute can cost more than years of this service. NNL is built to catch exactly those, before they happen. We do not promise a number. We show you the exposure and you decide if the floor is credible.
This is a sample entry from the IP Ancestry Ledger delivered at handoff. It reflects the real structure and language of the record. Details below are illustrative.
This is one track's entry in the IP Ancestry Ledger, the provenance record at the core of NNL. Every track in your catalog gets one: who contributed, the splits, ownership, samples, key terms, and the source documents behind each fact, with a verification date.
It is your proof. It settles split disputes before they start, speeds up licensing and sync requests, supports clean registration, and hands any lawyer or partner a complete picture in seconds instead of a folder of PDFs and half-remembered terms.
This is the first taste of how NNL works.
The questions below are the same ones we start the intake with. The output gives you a specific exposure diagnosis, a prioritized order for getting your rights on record, and a recommended setup for your catalog, before you spend a dollar. It takes about five minutes.
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