3. Importing clauses
Last updated
Last updated
When we uploaded the clause in the previous chapter, we manually copied it from Microsoft Word and pasted it into Clause9. Now while that works as an easy first step, it may become something of a hassle when you are trying to automate a lot of different clauses at the same time, featuring a lot of different concepts. To speed that process up a little bit, you can also choose to semi-automatically import these clauses directly from Microsoft Word.
To do so we will open the global panel and we will start by closing this clause, the severability clause, since we do not need to edit it anymore.
Then we can open the global panel by clicking the global panel icon in the top right-hand corner. Immediately you will see a new panel pop up on the left-hand side of the screen, you may also see that your menu on the right-hand side of the screen gets cut off a little bit. You can easily solve that problem by just zooming out a little bit or by using a larger screen.
Either way it is typically considered best practice to have a sufficiently large screen available so that you can constantly keep an accurate overview of all the elements in your Clause9 menu.
Now you will see in the global panel that you have a concepts overview which allows you to track all the concepts that are currently available to you in your library, or all the concepts that are available in this document. There is also an import mode which of course allows you to import documents directly into Clause9.
If you would like to have more information on how to use the concepts menu, check out the following link: https://help.clause9.com/misc/globo-panel
For this tutorial, we are focusing primarily on the import mode.
As you can see here, when you upload a document, Clause9 scans it and subdivides it into different clauses, it also already scans all the terminology that you may wish to add as a concept. Not all of this may immediately be correct, but you can provide further guidance by toggling the terms menu off or on, and then either using the bin icon to remove certain terms or using the plus icon to add terms that were not already added by Clause9.
Now in order to draw clauses from this overview you first need to open a clause file, so let us take a practical example with the help of the duration clause. You can open a new clause by clicking the plus icon in the top left hand corner clicking library clause. Since we are automating the duration clause, we may also want to immediately add a new regular folder. Let us say that we will use the term and termination as a name for this folder. Then we just select it, click select folder again.
The three most important elements to fill out whenever you are creating a new clause file are: the file name, content title and content body.
We will start by filling out a file name which in our case is going to be duration fixed. Why fix? Well because of course the duration clause in question is a fixed duration clause and that helps us to separate it or distinguish it from any eventual indefinite iteration clause, that we may want to add in the future.
Now ordinarily you would have to fill out content title and content body manually but of course that is where the import mode comes into play. As soon as we have opened a new clause file you will see that this import icon appears next to the different paragraphs, next to the different clauses. You can see that an icon appears next to the body of this duration clause and an icon appears next to the title. If we click the icon next to the body, then it is simply the content body of the clause that has been inserted into the file. If we click the icon next to the title, then both the content title and the content body have been inserted.
Of course, there is a little bit of clean-up work that we can still do here:
In the content title, the term duration does not need to be a concept, we can just use the hard-coded word duration.
In the content body, the placeholder [duration] also does not need to be a concept, so we will just remove this hashtag.
Finally, of course the concept of “duration” is not created yet so it cannot be recognized by Clause9 and to create that file, we again go over the same steps that we took when we created the agreement concept. Just click the error notification, click create a new concept, select the concepts folder, click select folder.
Then for concepts the only important thing now that we need to add is a concept label. We can just create a new quick English concept label. Here obviously, we will go for a standard term called duration. We may also go for another concept label called term if the need would arise. Then of course we can close this concept, because we do not need to really edit it anymore. As you can see this concludes the automation of our clause at least on the front of the flexible numbering that we have already added and the flexible terminology.
If your screen is a little bit too small you can just move it to the left a little bit to create more space.
If we click save and insert, then you can see here that the clause has officially been created. One other thing that you will note is that since we imported this clause into a ClauseBase file, the text is now displayed in green. That is because we have already imported this clause and so we do not really need to look at it anymore.
⏭ Now of course this makes the bulk of the import work a lot easier, but it is still up to you to create the next level of intelligence specifically with regards to these placeholders for variable information and that is something that we will look at the next page.
Do you want to learn more about this chapter? Check out our help page on introduction to importing clauses.
