1. Structuring your document
Last updated
Last updated
💡This time around we are taking a look at some more advanced functionalities by updating our existing Consultancy Agreements that we made in the previous tutorial series based on the new template that has been provided by the template author and which you are currently looking at.
If we scroll down this document a little bit, you will immediately notice that the styling has been changed rather significantly, but also that some of the existing content by way of track changes has been amended a little bit. If we scroll down even more you will also see that new content has been added like this entire agreement clause and if we scroll all the way down to the end of the document you will see that we even have an entirely new document attached to our Consultancy Agreement by way of an Annex.
1️⃣ What we’ll do first is make the necessary changes to the contents – that means adjusting the existing contents and creating new content.
2️⃣ Second, we will move on to styling, so making sure that the look and feel of the document in Clause9 matches the look and feel of the Microsoft Word document.
3️⃣ Lastly, we will move on to making any necessary adjustments to the Q&A based on all this new content that we will have added.
So let’s start with something basic. We’re going to be creating new content. This services clause, as you can see, is going to be adjusted. Whereas our initial services clause referred to a list of services, we now need a services clause that refers to Annex 1 where the services will be set out. As you can see here, the template author has indicated that this is an alternative option for setting out the list of services, so you may be tempted to outright rewrite the existing services clause.
But, since it is an alternative option that we’re creating, the original clause needs to persist in some way. We need to be able to reactivate it maybe at a later stage or maybe for a different document. The way that we do that is via alternatives. How those alternatives work and what those are will be explained in the next video.
❗️What’s important now is that we just create a new services clause.
So let’s move back to our Clause9 menu. We can actually go to “assemble document” first and then you can see we have our Consultancy Agreement template. We will select that and indicate “edit template” to make sure that we’re adjusting the base document and then if we scroll a little bit down to the services clause, as explained, we will not be rewriting this clause but we will take the opportunity to open it up by double clicking it and adjusting the file name already. Originally, we only had one services clause and so it worked to just call it services.
In the interest of keeping your clause library a little bit clean and and easily navigable, we will be adjusting the file name to indicate that contrast between the services clause that sets out a list in the clause and a services clause that references an Annex and that’s exactly what we’ll add. We’ll indicate that this has a list in the clause and that will allow from the reference to the Annex.
We can close that up because we don’t really need it anymore and since we’ve already selected the services clause we can now add a new library clause and it will automatically appear below the currently selected clause. So, that’s exactly what we’ll do – create a new library clause. We’re already located in the right folder, but if you have trouble finding it just go to the “my library” folder and then navigate to the “services folder” that we created earlier.
Then, we can click “select folder” and as you will remember there are three main menus that we need to take into account when we are creating a new clause: the file name, the content title and the content body.
📝 For the file name we can adopt a similar approach to the approach for the original services clause, only now we’re calling it “Services (reference to Annex)” because we want to make that contrast.
📝 For the content title, we will naturally go for “Services” because, as you can see, that is exactly what the title of this clause is.
📝 For the content body, we could conceivably use the import mode that we’ve used in the past, but if we’re being realistic, you know there are a lot of track changes so it’s going to be a little bit tricky to navigate that from the import mode. Which leads me to believe that it’s going to be quicker to just copy this text and paste it into the content body.
Now we’re not going to be completely manually setting this this text up. We’re just going to remove this placeholder and then we’re going to paste with the help of Clause9’s automatic text optimization.
So if we click this button right here Clause9 is just going to paste all of the content that’s in our clipboard but it’s also going to already identify potentially interesting terms that need to be changed to a concept. Here for the consultant you can see that it recognizes that the consultant should be a concept. It also recognizes that the consultant starts at the start of a sentence so the concept needs to be written with a capital “C” to make sure that the letter “T” in the consultant will start with a capital letter.
Another thing that is potentially something that we could still improve upon is the @plural special function which essentially forces the concept here (#services) to always be displayed in its plural form. That works but on the other hand it’s not all that necessary, especially because, as you will remember, we created the concept label for this concept services as being plural by default. So, here we can just remove this special function and add a period at the end of this sentence and then that is our services clause. If we click “Save & insert” you will see that it is now created below the original services clause.
We will be removing the other services clause in the next video when we tackle the alternatives that we’re going to be turning these into. For now, we’re okay with what we have here. If we take another look at the base document you can see that we also need to create a new miscellaneous section where we also add a new clause “entire agreement” to it. Our severability clause was originally its own sort of individual entity, but now it needs to be transformed into a subclause.
You may be immediately asking yourselves:
❓“Well, how do I create a content title above the content title? How do I create a second layer there?” and the the answer is very simple. You can just create a new ad hoc clause or even a library clause that then contains the necessary clause, or rather the necessary title and only the content title. You can do that manually or you can select this severability clause and indicate that you would like to have a new clause title.
If we then write miscellaneous here then you will see that immediately a new ad hoc clause is created. You can tell because it says “update ad hoc” here that only contains a content title called “Miscellaneous”. We can actually immediately get rid of that because we don’t really need to do anything else with it. We can also close this clause.
Now you may be asking yourself:
❓“Well I still need the title for severability, has this new clause replaced that title in any sense?” and of course the answer is no. You will remember that titles can be toggled on or off so Clause9 just automatically toggled the title for the severability clause off, but we can turn it back on by clicking this title clause, just selecting the severability clause and then clicking “title” to turn that back on.
Same principle as we’ve done countless times already now. We just create a new library clause.
📁 We will create this in the “Boilerplate” folder because an entire agreement clause is typically considered a boilerplate clause.
📝 We’ll call this “entire agreement” and for the content title we will simply copy this from the file name.
📝 For the content body again, we could use the import mode, but since we’re using the paste optimization, let’s just continue on that front. Here we just paste the original text from MicrosoftWord into Clause9 and we essentially run into the same situation where this agreement concept was correctly identified and correctly inserted.
For the parties, we can again remove the @plural special function because the parties by default is portrayed in the plural version. If we then click “Save & insert” you will see that we have recreated our miscellaneous section again. We’re not too worried about styling just yet, so that’s why this is fine for now.
One final element that we will add in terms of new structure: as you can see here, the template author has indicated that this signature table needs to start on a different page. That’s something that we can force in in our own document as well. We’ll just, first of all, close this existing clause and then we will select the new, or rather, the existing signature table.
💡Remember, anytime you select a clause, the advanced menu will pop up. If you have deselected anything or if you deselected your existing or your selected clause then that advanced menu will not pop up.
But, if we have selected this clause and then navigate to the advanced menu you can see that we have all sorts of available options. The one that we need is to “start the clause on a new page”.
✅ For now that settles it for the updates to the structure of the clauses and the documents.
⏭ In the next chapter, we will be tackling the different alternative options that have been indicated by the template author.
If you didn’t have the change to go through out basic clause author tutorial, we recommend you watch it first as we’re building on the lessons learned there. You can find it here: Basic clause author tutorial.
Make sure to keep the Clause9 Grammar Sheet handy as you will be using it throughout the chapters.
