Legal person

A legal person is either:

an individual human OR
a non-human entity such as a company, charity, or government agency.

The term legal person captures the fact that both humans and non-human entities can be treated as a person for certain legal purposes, such as owning property, opening a bank account, or entering into contracts.

In the API

In the Griffin API, your organisation and your customers are all represented by legal persons. When you sign up with Griffin, your organisation will be automatically assigned a unique legal person ID. When onboarding your customers, you will need to create legal persons to represent them.

The API categorises legal persons as either an individual or a corporation:

an individual represents a individual human (sometimes referred to as a “natural person”)
a corporation represents any non-human entity (not just companies)

A corporation legal person should have at least one director and/or owner attached to it, who must be represented as a distinct individual legal person.

You can add an individual legal person as shown below.

curl "https://api.griffin.com/v0/organizations/$ORGANIZATION_ID/legal-persons" \
  -X 'POST' \
  -H "Authorization: GriffinAPIKey $GRIFFIN_API_KEY" \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  --data-binary '{"legal-person-type":"individual","display-name":"Leah Grahame"}'

This will return the following:

{
  "legal-person-type": "individual",
  "display-name": "Leah Grahame",
  "legal-person-claims-url": "/v0/legal-persons/lp.Usy-EabcWQqK-2FuiCrIfA/claims"
}

Once you've created a legal person, you will also need to add claims about them so that they can be onboarded. See our guide for onboarding your customers.

In the API​

In the API