Corporation as Code
Rethinking Corporate Records for the Digital Age
Xavier Beauchamp-Tremblay & Frédéric Boivin Couillard
March 2026
Despite decades of digitization, corporate law remains conceptually tethered to paper. Charters, bylaws, resolutions, and minute books are now drafted, signed, and stored electronically, yet they continue to be treated as static, document-centric artifacts rather than as structured representations of legal relationships. This paper argues that the persistence of the “paper paradigm” obscures the true nature of the corporation in a digital environment and forecloses possibilities for automation, interoperability, and legal certainty.
We introduce the concept of the corporation as code: a model in which the legal entity is natively represented as a structured, version-controlled data object rather than as a collection of documents. Under this approach, corporate attributes (ownership, governance rules, historical actions, and organizational relationships) are expressed as standardized data structures, with traditional documents functioning as human-readable views generated from an authoritative computational source.
Drawing on software engineering practices such as version control and schema validation, we show how these techniques provide more accurate and auditable representations of corporate change than document-based workflows. We examine how structured corporate data enables new organizational forms, propose integrating legal architecture within enterprise architecture frameworks, and argue that using AI to interpret unstructured documents represents an inefficient detour. Generative AI coding assistants now enable lawyers to work directly with structured corporate data, dissolving the traditional barrier between legal expertise and programmatic implementation.
By reframing the corporation as a computable artifact, this paper advances a design-oriented vision of corporate law in which legal certainty and automation arise from how legal entities are modeled from inception.