Make sure to actually complete the steps set out in these videos! Further tutorials and exercises will require you to augment the material created in this tutorial. If you have not created the material yourself, you cannot progress to other tutorials.

To get started, download the following documents:

Create a new document

So, let’s get right to it, you can open a new document in your Clause9 account by navigating to the assemble document menu at the top of your screen and then open a new document by clicking the plus icon in the top right-hand corner.

Save the document

We are greeted with an empty document which we will first need to save.

We can do so by navigating to the file tab in the operations panel. Here we can fill out a document name to start with (this is how this file/this document will be portrayed in the actual library). We can choose something basic, like for example consultancy agreement. We can then optionally also designate a certain category, this is primarily useful when you have multiple different documents, in multiple different domains and need a clear indication of which document pertains to which domain. We will skip this for now.

You could also designate whether you would like this document to be displayed as a template. That is primarily useful to be able to distinguish between concrete contracts or legal documents that were generated from the basis of a template and those templates themselves. In this case we are in fact creating a base template, so we will check this box.

Designate a location

And then finally we can also designate a location in the library for this document.

📂 The default folder that is selected here is the “my documents” folder, and that will be sufficient for now.

📂 You can also store it in a certain group library. Group libraries are little private corners of the library that are available only to a specific team or specific department.

📂 There is also the “my library” folder which is primarily intended as a personal storage space for clauses and not necessarily documents, because of course we also have the “my documents” folder. That is exactly where we will save this document, by clicking the “save document” button at the top here.

Document Title

Now, of course, we have created this file but there is still no content present.

One of the first things that we can do to amend this, is go to the “document” menu in the operations panel and fill out a document title. This is different from a document name under the file tab, because that is how the document is displayed in the library. The document title is essentially the title that is going to appear at the top of the document and that corresponds to the default style that you have set up to that end.

For us that is going to be “consultancy agreement“. Because if we look at our base document, we can see that it also features the title “consultancy agreement” right at the top.

And with all of that out of the way it is now time to create our first clause!

The fortunate thing about Clause9 is that clauses are flexible, and you can change their location at the drop of a hat, so you do not have to start automating a document from the top and then work your way down. You can just start with a basic easy clause just to warm up a little bit. That is exactly what we will do, if we take a quick look at our base document here and scroll down a little bit, you will see that there is this severability clause which is a fairly easy clause to start off with, and that is the one that we will take first.

New Clause

So, I will quickly copy the contents of this clause while we are in the document and then go back to the Clause9 menu. Now to create a clause you first click the +-icon in the top left-hand corner. You are presented with three options here:

1️⃣ Definition list: you can ignore this for now, we will come back to that later.

2️⃣ Ad hoc-clause: this is a clause that is very much document-specific, meaning that it will not show up in the library, it is not going to be able to be reused across other different documents. It is native to this document only.

3️⃣ Library clause: these are clauses that are stored in the library, and which can be reused.

Choose a folder

Here Clause9 is asking us where you want to store this clause that you are about to create and that is where “my library” folder comes into play. The “my library” folder is a general folder where you can store your clauses but in order to make it more easily navigable, make it easier to retrieve the proper content, you can also create an entire folder structure to assist users and yourself in navigating to the right place.

So, we will create a regular folder here. We will come back to all these different types of folders at a later chapter, and we will click regular folder now. Of course, since we are creating a severability clause, we will need to store this clause in a folder that makes sense. Now since severability is typically considered a boilerplate clause, we will simply call this folder boilerplate.

Click create a new folder and then we can select this folder, click select folder in the bottom right-hand corner and now we have decided on a location for this clause. You will immediately see that we have this new edit menu in the operations panel, there is this new tab in this edit menu for our new clause and on the right-hand side you can see that there is all manner of intelligence that we can add to this clause.

Most of that we will be looking at later in this tutorial series.

Add content

For now, the important ones that you need to consider are:

• The file name:

  • Is how the clause will be displayed in the library.

  • For the file name we can choose something simple like for example just severability. Alternatively, if we add another severability clause, an alternative for example which is a bit lengthier we could say that this clause is named severability short, whereas the future clause will then be named severability long. But since we do not have any alternatives like that, yet we will simply suffice by writing severability in the file name.

• The content title:

  • Is the title that we built will be displayed for this clause in the actual document.

  • As you saw earlier in the source document, we can see that the title is simply severability, so we will be writing the exact same thing in the content title. A neat little trick is that you can also just copy your content title from the file name and then it immediately shows up here in the content title field.

• The content body:

  • Is of course the body text of the clause.

  • Finally of course we need to copy the text from Microsoft Word into the content body field which as you know we copied earlier, and so we will just paste that now.

If I click save and insert, then this is the actual moment when the clause is created and when it is also stored.

You will also see that Clause9 recognizes that this paragraph is in fact a paragraph number, but it also knows to construct its own numbering based on what makes sense for this particular document.

You can then also add new paragraphs, like for example we can have one at the same level, which is paragraph two, another paragraph which is paragraph three, and we can even go a couple of levels down paragraph 3.1, 3.1.1 etc. And if we save in library to update this clause, you can see here that the appropriate numbering with the appropriate styling is applied to different subclauses of various levels.

✅ With all of that done you have essentially created your first basic clause.

⏭ Next up we will find out how to add another layer of flexibility outside just from the numbering in the form of flexible terminology.

If you now click save in library again to update the clause, you can see that it will display zero. But that is of course because we haven’t yet filled out any values here. We can either fill out these values in the interactive preview in the yellow placeholder boxes or we can also navigate to the datafields menu where we have an overview of all the datafields in the document and where we can also quickly select values for them.

So here in the commencement dates we can say that for example the 21st of September is our commencement date and it will then also be displayed in the interactive preview. Then we can also select a duration, let’s go with a duration of one year. Side note: the notation for your dates whether you prefer 21 September or September 21st are all things that you can organize centrally from a central styling menu. So we won’t be going into too much detail on this now but know that you can always amend this, if this is not your preferred date notation. Then of course you can see here that if we select the commencement date as being the 21st of September, if we select the duration as being one year then we can see that the termination date will effectively occur on one year later, on the 21st of September 2022. Now this sort of intelligence can of course be very useful to speed up the process of calculating certain terms, certain dates, sums of money, certain numbers, etc.

5.2 Conditional warning in Q&A mode

Go to the “Consultancy Agreement. Q&A”. The minimum monthly renumeration under “Plan C” of the fees is 3.000 euro. You want to give the end user a warning if an amount lower than 3.000 euro is filled out.

Warning

This monthly renumeration is too low. The minimum renumeration is 3.000 euro/month.

Create the following predefined values for the question "Agreement - Duration" to suggest 'best practices' to your user:

• 2 years

• 1 year

• 6 months

Create a memo

Create a memo for the question "Jurisdiction" under the card "Agreement" with the following text:

Do note that certain jurisdictions may apply uncircumventable (“mandatory”) rules that invalidate such an exclusion. Furthermore, your jurisdiction’s laws may be mature enough to remove the need to explicitly state this to avoid situations of renvoi and other issues that may enforce a different applicable law then what was intended.

Add help text

Add help text to the question "Hours dedicated per month" under the card "Services":

The dedicated hours per month typically do not exceed 150.

Add answer hints

Provide the following answer hint to the question "List" under the card "Services":

Advisory services, financial services, marketing services,...

Include a comment

Add the following comment below the question "Jurisdiction" in the card "Agreement":

The competent court is automatically selected based on the applicable law chosen above.

You can see that here it says “new binder”. We have this new tab here for any documents that we’re going to be adding and the document menu is replaced with a binder menu in the operations toolbar. If we open this binder menu we can start adding some new documents.

Before we do that, it’s important to make sure that we’re working with the most up-to-date version of our Consultancy Agreement and our Services Annex.

What we’ll do is:

1️⃣ save this document

2️⃣ close the clauses currently opened in the edit menu by holding down the shift key and then closing one of the tabs – that will automatically close all of the tabs that have currently been saved and

3️⃣ close the services annex and close the clauses currently opened

Now we can upload a new existing document, which is in first instance going to be our Consultancy Agreement. We can upload another existing document which is going to be our Services Annex and we haven’t actually provided a document title for this Services Annex. We can do that here Annex 1 – Services.

One of the first things you will notice is that you have these tabs now that allow you to switch between the different documents contained in the binder. But, you’ll also see that there is a padlock icon 🔒 attached to the binder.

The reason for that is the following – there exists a link between the individual source documents: the individual Consultancy Agreement, the individual Services Annex and the binder.

The reason for that is if we were to make changes to the binder document then it would start leading a separate life from the individual source document which is why by default these documents are locked. If you want to make changes to the structure of the underlying document the rule is that nine out of ten times you’ll want to be able to do that from the individual source document. You can of course click that padlock icon to open this document up and as soon as we do that you can see that there are all of these options available to change the structure of the document. But as soon as you start making changes that way, you are going to be creating a copy, so this this binder document or this version of the document included in the binder is going to start looking different from the individual source document.

If all of that is confusing really the only thing that you need to remember is changes to the Consultancy Agreement are made in the individual Consultancy Agreement and not in the binder because those changes will be made from the individual document to the binder.

With all of that out of the way, we can also create this this file. We’ll call this a Consultancy Agreement + Annex just to differentiate it from the original Consultancy Agreement. We will display that as a binder and we will save that in the “my documents” folder. So, save that binder and then there’s only a few more things that we need to do.

Creating a cross-reference between documents

First of all we need to create a definition for the services which indicates that the services shall have the meaning set forth in Annex 1 and of course we need to create this cross-reference as well in this first article. We can navigate into that clause and we can actually make changes here in that clause because, remember, aside from the explanation that I just gave in relation to the individual document and the binder, clauses remain files unto themselves. So, clauses are fair game.

It’s just the structure of the document, the existence of certain clauses, the removal of a certain clause, the location, all of that is padlocked in a binder. So here we can just create a cross reference as we would ordinarily. We will just create one with the help of a basic cross tag which we’re going to call “annex-services”. You can see that no annex-services tag has been found, and now you may be wondering “How do we create a cross reference to an Annex, how do we find the cross-tags menu for an individual document?” and the answer is fairly simple – if we navigate to the binder menu and scroll all the way down we can go into the “properties” of the individual documents contained in the binder or the binder itself in its entirety.

In this case, we’re opening up the properties of Annex 1, and you can see that it just opens that document up in the edit menu as you would ordinarily also do with clauses. For this document, you can see it’s differentiated from the other tab by virtue of its icon. You also have quite a few different options including also cross-tags. So we will add the cross-tag “annex-services” and then save that in the library, and immediately the cross-reference is made, but of course we in the source document are not referencing to Annex 1 – Services, we just want to refer to the shorter title of Annex 1. That’s why in the binder menu you can see that we have these full titles for the document which are displayed at the top, which essentially function as the document title in the document itself, but we also have these short titles so we can indicate that we would like to reference the document in the short version by filling out “Annex 1” and then that reference is correct.

We can do the same for the definition itself. So, if we go into the terms menu, we have no definition chosen yet for the services. We can create a new one in the library in which case we will drop this in the definitions folder, and there we will indicate as stated in the base document – shall have the meaning set forth in Annex 1 – so we’ll indicate the definition like so. Then immediately in the terms menu, we will be able to set up this new definition.

✅ That essentially concludes all of the things that we need to know about binders.

⏭ To complete the automation of this new version of the Consultancy Agreement in the next chapter, we’re going to take a look at how to make sure that the styling remains consistent across these documents and how some of the more advanced styling functionalities work.

More information on the structure of conditions .

This is exactly where an action button comes into play. So, let’s do just that. We’re going to go back into our Clause9 menu and we are going to go to the termination clause, which as you can see still features the original paragraph 5.3. We’re going to cut that out of the content body and save the new termination clause and then we’re going to create a new library clause inside of the term and termination folder which we are going to call “survival”. We’re going to also include the content title. We’ll copy that from the file name and then finally we’ll paste the paragraph that we took from article 5 into the content body. We can then optionally also turn paragraph 3 into paragraph 1. It doesn’t really make any difference, but this is a little bit cleaner.

As soon as we click “Save and insert” our new survival clause has been created and then it’s just a matter of taking these three bullets and kind of performing the same exercise on them – turning them all into individual subclauses.

Creating individual subclauses

We’re going to cut all three bullets out of article 5. We’ll again save our changes and then we’re going to create a new library clause, but before we create a library clause we’re going to go inside of the “Term and termination” folder and we’re going to create a subfolder “Termination events”. Why that is important you’ll see later on when we create the action button.

We’ll create a new regular folder inside of the term in termination folder which we will call “Termination events” and then we’re going to place our new clause into this termination events folder.

We’re going into the content body first because we know that we have three bullets and just want to check which one is first, that is obviously the termination for disloyalty dishonesty or fraud so we’re going to cut the two remaining bullets out and give this a file name “termination for dishonesty, disloyalty and fraud”, no content title needed, the content body is fine as it is, and so we can “save and insert”.

Now, do note that, of course, if you have a clause selected and then create a new library clause it’s automatically going to be inserted at the same level, which is not what we want. We want this to be a sub-clause of 5.2, so we move that right two times just so we make sure that it is an actual sub-clause and then we repeat the exercise. So, we create a new library clause inside of the termination events folder again. We’ll go into the content body first and check which one is up next. We’re going to cut the last bullet out of there and then see that this is the “determination for demonstrably poor delivery of services” so we’ll call this termination for poor delivery or poor delivery of services, doesn’t really matter all that much. No content title needed and the content body is fine as is. So, again we save and insert and then we can also optionally indent it one level to the right ideally and then we just have the final sub-clause to take care of. Again, new clause in the termination events folder, we’re going to go into the content body first, paste the clause in question unreasonable refusal by the consultant to carry out the services. So, we’re going to call this “termination for unreasonable refusal to carry out services” no content title needed again, content body is fine as is, so we’re going to click “Save & insert” and again, we can indent it one level to the right additionally.

Setting up the action button

Now we have our individual subclauses, but of course we still need to create the action button that would allow us to activate these subclauses at will. Since the action button serves to enrich an existing clause and add subclauses to that clause, that means that we’re going to attach the action button to our original termination clause article 5. To attach an action button to that clause, we just open it up in edit mode, so we double click it and then we go to “More” and select “Action button” and then we create a new action button.

We can just fill out all the information that needs to be filled out. In this case, the button caption just says what is going to be portrayed, what’s the text going to be that’s on the button. In our case, that’s just going to be “termination events”. The button position is either above or below the subclauses. I personally prefer above, but you’re free to do with that as you please.

Then you can see that the action in question for which the action button gets its name is manifold, there are lots of different things that we can do with the action in question.

1️⃣ First of all, we can ask Clause9 to execute a certain search in the search menu based on, for example, a certain keyword, a certain attribute, a certain location, a certain link. All that material we can define what sort of search needs to happen as a user clicks the button. That’s not really what we’re going for right now.

2️⃣ Secondly, we have the option to let our users immediately go into a certain folder in the browse menu as we click the action button.

3️⃣ Finally, we can also manually and individually attach certain clauses to the action button that would allow users to just select from a list, much as the alternatives icon also does.

For this tutorial, we’re just going to go to the selected folder. As you will remember, Clause9 allows us to choose a folder to browse. We specifically created a termination events folder just for this purpose. So, we’ll select the “termination events” folder and Clause9 just asks us what do we do with button visibility, do you want to always show the button or hide it when at least one subclause exists. My personal preference is to just always show it.

That concludes the setup of our action button. If we click “Save in library” you will see that the clause 5.2, or clause 5 in general, now features a green button which is our action button. If we just close all of these individual clauses for a second, except for the termination clause, then you can see as we click this action button, the individual subclauses included in the termination events folder are automatically portrayed. If we just remove those from the document for a second, then we could conceivably click the action button be transported to the browse folder and just indicate “YES”, I would like this to be a subclause here. Then you can also optionally indent it one level to the right even more just to make sure that it is a subclause of 5.2 and not just the subclause of 5. So it’s not on the level of 5.2 but it’s on a one level lower and you can essentially continue doing the same thing to make sure that all of the subclauses are included.

Then we’ll move that one level to the right like so, but of course there is one minor issue that then still pops up and you can already kind of see it here in the list of clauses that we have activated currently. Because we created these individual subclauses, we have also created a lot of flexibility on how, or rather, in which order these clauses can appear and that messes up that messes our punctuation up a little bit.

Punctuation with alternative clauses – AND/OR functions

So how do we solve that problem? Well, we allow Clause9 to make the choice for us as to which punctuation mark needs to appear. To do that, we just remove all the punctuation at the end of each sentence from each individual subclause and we simply indicate to Clause9 in our article 5.2. If we go back into the content body, we simply indicate what kind of enumeration that we are creating and your grammar sheet contains more information on that.

But for now, we want to essentially say either bullet 1 or bullet 2 or bullet 3 and in that case we just write “*OR” and watch what happens when we click “Save in library” immediately the correct punctuation is added to these individual subclauses. We can do the same for *AND if that’s something that we would want to do, and then instead of the word “or” it says “and”. We could also do that for AND/OR and then similar thing is displayed, but of course we need to just do “or” for now. So the way that these punctuation marks are displayed is also something that you can define centrally in your styling menu, but if we now switch the order of these subclauses around a little bit, you can see that the punctuation jumps along with it as necessary.

✅ That concludes the setup of our action button.

🔗 This link immediately takes you into the list of special functions where you can then scroll and check and see whether there’s anything that can help you there. Obviously, each special function is kind of explained with a few words on how to best use it!

For the first special function that we’re going to be tackling in this chapter, we need to again start exploring this particular paragraph which as you remember from the previous chapter we indicated should not be repeated all this time. Also if we take a look at the source document, you can also see that if we scroll all the way down, the template author has indicated that this clause should only be included if more than one service is assigned or if more than one entry is entered into our repeating list data fields from last chapter.

So, let’s do just that. First of all, we’re going to have to remove this paragraph from the repeated clause because we only want it to appear once so it should fall outside of that repetition. Then, we’re just going to create a new library clause. Obviously we’re going to do that in the services folder. We can call that clause something along the lines of “services not exhaustive” for example. Then we just paste the content body. No need for content title. You can optionally also put this paragraph number correctly, save and insert. We can also, of course, turn the numbering off because that’s how it is portrayed in the base document, and then the idea is to enable or disable this clause depending on the amount of services that have been created.

What I’m going to do is write the condition that is going to enable or disable this clause using the special function and then I’ll give a word of explanation of what exactly I just created.

Enabled option and the @count special function

This is the condition, this is going to enable or disable this paragraph depending on the amount of services that have been identified, and essentially it starts with this special function @count. What this does is, as usual, you write the name of your special function and then between brackets you write the element that it has its effect on or the parameter that it has its effect on. Here in this particular instance we are saying to Clause9 please count the amount of times that the data field services names has been filled in.

We could have also chosen services descriptions, but since we’re already using that to repeat the clause on right, it makes more sense to just use that one that would also be the most logical field to fill out first is the name of the service. So, we’re telling Clause9 “please count the amount of times that the services names has been filled in” – in other words, how many types of services have been identified and then, if that number is higher than 1, then this clause is going to be enabled. So, we’re going to save that in the library with this condition. Of course, the clause is still being portrayed, but if we go to the data fields menu and we delete two of the services names’ entries, all of a sudden, this clause is deactivated, disabled, because of course there is only one service that is being identified.

That’s our first special function, the @count special function. If we take another look at the source documents, specifically in article 7 or article 6 rather, you can see that an optional cross reference has been included to article 7 where the template author has also indicated that this cross reference should only be included if the clause in question is used. That makes sense because in the previous tutorial series, you will remember, we created conditional logic with the enabled fields that allows us to deactivate or activate enable or disable the non-compete clause so if we’re going to reference the non-compete clause we need to make sure that it’s actually in the document. So, let’s dive back into Clause9 and take a look at how we can do that.

We’ll go back into the Consultancy Agreement. We will first of all set up the cross reference, the way that we would normally do this.

Since we already have that concept, makes a lot of sense to quickly create a cross-reference on that basis. As you will remember, and as you can also see here from this cross reference, you would just write the paragraph symbol (§), the non-compete concept and “and” and then we can save that in the library. Naturally, at this point in time, Clause9 is going to give us an error notification because no anchor has really been defined. We’re not referencing anything yet because we haven’t linked a clause to a concept.

Linking a clause to a concept

So, that’s what we’re going to do just now. We’re going to open up this non-compete clause and establish an outgoing link with the concept of non-compete and as soon as we hit “Save in library” here then you are going to see that we still have that error notification.

Why is that? Well, of course, this clause is currently disabled. The condition that it applies to is currently not activated, so of course Clause9 is going to say “yes, you can see this because you’re the author and you need to know that this clause could potentially be activated” but naturally the cross reference is not going to work, so we’re not going to reference that. For all intents and purposes, this clause is not in the document for this cross reference, so the way that we can solve that is if we activate the condition that enables this non-compete clause. Then you can see that the cross-reference is used.

@implemented conditional logic

Now the only thing that remains to us is to create conditional logic that allows us to hide this cross-reference if the non-complete clause is not in the document and to show it if it is indeed in the document. The special function that we will be using to do that is what we call the @implemented special function. We’re just going to write the condition in question @implemented(#non-compete): §non-compete and the word “and” which is also going to be inserted here.

Now, the way that this condition works is essentially we are asking Clause9 is the concept of non-compete implemented anywhere in this document, i.e is there any clause in the document that specifically has that implementation link to the concept of non-compete. If that is the case, then we make the cross-reference to the article containing the non-compete and also the word “and” because we are referring to a second cross-reference right after. Now you can see nothing really changes because our non-compete has already been activated, but if we turn this condition off, if we indicate that the non-compete is not included in the list of optional clauses, then all of a sudden this cross-reference is dropped and those are the two special functions for this chapter.

We’ll start the way that we always start by creating a new library clause. We’re creating the non-complete clause here so the boilerplate folder should be fine for that. Create a new file name called non-compete and then of course I can import the content title and content body, directly from my import menu in the global panel. Scroll all the way down and as you can see the indentation for these sub clauses in the compared to the main title of the clause here is perfectly fine. The only thing that we really need to do in order to import this clause is to indicate that the comment by the template author should be disabled, as we’ve done quite a few times already now.

Then just click the import button, we can then also close the global panel and as you can see the content title has correctly been imported. We only need to remove these square brackets and the content body has also been imported. The only thing we need to clean up here is to indicate that this placeholder is not a concept, so as soon as we click save and insert you can see that the clause has been created. Now it’s just a matter of creating a condition that applies to both of these paragraphs.

Enabled Condition

Let’s say that we were creating a true or false type datafield, let’s say we’re creating a condition with the true or false datafields. Obviously, we’re going to be looking at a different type of datafields but purely as an example we would probably write something along these lines. Let’s say that the question that we’re trying to ask with the datafield: is the non-compete clause applicable, yes or no? Then we could write non-compete applicable equals true colon and then close off this condition at the end of the second paragraph.

Now unfortunately, things don’t work like that. You can not stretch a condition over multiple paragraphs in this way, but the good news is that there is a specific field that you can use especially for this kind of operation. With these field, you’re enabling or disabling an entire clause with one condition or with a combination of multiple conditions. We’ve already looked at file names, content title and content body. Those are the only three menus in the clause editor that we’ve actually looked at.

We’re also going to be looking at this enabled menu, and this enabled menu allows you to do one very basic thing. It allows you to create a condition that essentially enables or disables an entire clause. Perfect for what we’re trying to achieve here, since this field will always contain a condition by definition, it should be a condition that is that is included here. You don’t even need to write the curly brackets so you can suffice with, for example writing non-compete applicable equals true. That would be a valid condition.

We won’t create this concept and create this datafield, we won’t go through that entire process because as I stated earlier, we’re trying to create a new type of condition. One that we haven’t really looked at before.

• We’ve looked at true or false type of conditions

• We’ve looked at text datafield-based conditions

• Now we’re going to take a look at list of text datafield-based conditions, where essentially the datafield type that we’re using is of course the list of text datafields.

Conditionality

I’ll start by creating the actual condition and then we’ll do a quick analysis of what the structure of that condition is.

1. The Question: Let’s first of all say that the question that we’re trying to ask with this datafield, that’s of course always the starting point, is: “which optional clauses are made available in the document”? Which optional clauses do you want to activate in this document? Let’s say that that is the question since we’re going to be creating a list of sorts you know.

2. The Answer: We need to be able to answer multiple things, multiple different answers to that question. Let’s say that in this particular case, one of those answers should be non-compete. If we know that that is the question, we know that our datafield is going to be for example agreement optional clauses.If we were using a text datafield, we might write something like this. But since a list of text datafields is essentially a collection of multiple different values, we can’t write it like this because this would imply that the entire collection is just this value and that’s just not true. There can be multiple different values in the entire collection.

3. The Result: So the way that you write a condition for a list of text datafields or rather for a condition based on a list of text datafields is as follows: non-compete in agreement optional clauses, so essentially what we’re saying here is the value non-compete should be included in the list of values, which we will include in the agreement optional clauses datafield.

Of course, if we then create this datafield, we’re not creating a text datafield, we’re not creating a true or false datafield, we are creating this list of text datafields. Watch what happens as soon as we click save in library. As you can see this clause has now been struck through in red which means that it has been disabled. That’s of course because we haven’t provided the non-compete answer to the question which optional clauses are included in the agreement. Which is essentially the question that we’re asking with this datafield.

If we select this clause and go to the datafields menu you can actually see the reason why this clause has been disabled, you can see that there’s this popup where you can essentially ask why is this clause disabled and then Clause9 will say that the datafields agreement optional clauses must contain the value non-compete. If we were to fill this datafield out, you can see that the clause is now no longer struck through in red and that it has been enabled instead of disabled. If it is in its disabled state, let’s say that we remove this again, if it isn’t in this disabled state, you can see it is structured in red. That is solely to assist you as the user by informing you that there is a clause present here, it just hasn’t been enabled yet.

If you export this document now, this clause will not show up in the export. If there were an article 5 below this article 4, upon export that article would be made into article 4 because of course article 4 being non-compete is simply not present in this agreement. Then there’s one thing of course that we can do that we also did for the text datafields which is to create a predefined. That will allow us or at least other users to more accurately engage with this datafield and with this clause, so in order to add a predefined, we simply navigate into the concept where we created the datafield. Here we click the agreement hyperlink at the bottom of the screen.

• Create a predefined: We go to the datafields menu, we select the optional clauses datafields and there we can add this predefined called non-compete. And if we then save this in the library, you can see that we have now been granted an option to fill out the non-compete value for this datafield. And that essentially wraps up how you create this kind of a condition.

Create datafields

Before we fully close off this clause though, it is important to remember that we need to do a few more things to fully automate this clause. Which is to create two datafields here. Now we’ve already created a duration type of datafield, which was the agreements duration. But of course we’re dealing with a different question here, we’re not dealing with the duration of the agreement, we’re dealing with the duration of the non-compete obligation. Sometimes the two might be the same but in many other cases the two will be something different.

So while you might be tempted to write #agreementduration here, in reality you’re asking a different kind of question, you’re not asking the agreements duration, you’re asking the non-compete obligations duration. So ideally we write this type of datafield here, so we’ll quickly create this new concept. We’re not using it as a term so we don’t need to immediately include a concept label. And then of course we’ll turn that into a duration type of datafields.

Then if we select a type of datafield, that we’ll be creating for this for the particular datafield, you may also be tempted to say that this should be a number datafield. But the correct type of datafield is the currency datafield, because as you can see here, if we quickly create this datafield. A currency datafield allows us to fill out both a number and a currency of which type of sum of money essentially, this this refers to. So we could fill out something like five euros or five US dollars or five British pound.

That’s what a currency datafield allows you to do and again it’s important to always choose the right type of datafield because that also allows you to do all sorts of mathematical equations, as we looked at in a previous chapter.

But other than that those are the only real tricky bits in this particular clause, so as soon as we have saved this we are ready to move on to our next clause.

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.

Structuring clauses

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.

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.

Automatic text optimization

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.

Creating a new clause title

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.

We’re already halfway there. The only thing that remains is to create this “Entire agreement” clause.

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.

Starting the clause on a new page

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.

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.

We’ll start by first closing the existing clause, since we ordered this currently open clause since we don’t really need it anymore and then create a new library clause. We don’t really have a suitable folder to place this in right now, so we’ll just create a new folder which we’ll call services. And then place that clause in the services folder and then we’ll also naturally create a file name along the likes of services. Content title and content body can of course be imported via the global panel.

We don’t really need to do anything to optimize the import here, so we can just click this import icon, close the global panel. Then the content title and the content body will be inserted.

Now Clause9 has chosen to transform this title services into the concept services, that’s a valid approach there. There are arguments to be made for that, however it’s not really necessary at this point in time, so you can just hard code that word services as is. Then the content body is of course fine like that, the only thing that we still need to do is to replace this placeholder with a datafield where users can fill out a list of different elements.

Create a datafield

Of course, if you hear datafields and lists in the same sentence, then you should immediately be thinking of a list of texts datafield that users can fill in. For the name of this datafields you could go with quite a few different options, you could go with agreement, services for example. We recommend you to use services list and that’s because you will have a lot of different arguments to make for including datafields in the agreement concept. If we then create this datafield naturally we’re going to be creating a list of texts datafield and then we’ll click save and insert to actually create this clause.

Now as you can see here, we have in the interactive preview the option to fill out multiple different elements to this list. So the first element we’ll say is marketing, the second element for example will be sales, and the final element will be let’s say legal advice services that are offered by the consultant. If we now click apply to insert all of those elements into the actual document, then you can see here that clause base transforms this not into a bulleted list but simply in a list included in this one bullet. Of course, here we need to manipulate the text so that it is actually portrayed as a bulleted list.

Create a bulleted list

Fortunately, we have a special function just for that, the approach to writing special functions always happens in three steps:

1. First of all you write the @ symbol.

2. Then you write the name of the special function (in our case that is bullets).

3. Then you surround the different parameters that it manipulates, (the different text bits that that are affected by the special function) with parentheses.

In our case we are simply including, and for this special function in particular, we are simply transforming this particular list into bullets. So that’s the only parameter, the only item that we really need to include here, in this in this special function. And if I now click save in library, you can see that the text is included in a bulleted list. I could even turn this into cumulative enumeration too, by writing dash and at the end of the special function, to showcase the word and in the second to last element of the list. I can do the same for or, and I can even try and do this for and or, if you would be so inclined. For now the bullets list will suffice.

So that’s one example of a list or of a special function that we can use to optimize the text, the second example that we’ll be taking a look at, is the fees clause. Where in particular we need to be able to flexibly play around with how this word hour is displayed, depending on whether or not one hour is filled out. In which case this word needs to be the word hour or multiple hours are chosen, in which case the word needs to be hours.

Create a new clause

So we will again close the currently open clause, we will create a new library clause. We can add this clause to the services folder, if you prefer having a folder a separate folder called fees, you’re welcome to create that. Then we can of course name the file name fees and we can of course import the content directly from the global panel. Again nothing we really need to do to optimize the import here, so we just click this import icon, close the global panel and then the content title is as it should be and the content body is as it should be.

Create a datafield

Now the real interesting stuff happens in paragraph two, so let’s quickly get paragraph one out of the way where we still need to create a datafield here. We have already looked at currency datafields in the past, naturally there is a sum of money that needs to be filled out here, so we’re going to be using a currency datafield again.

The name of the currency datafields again is more or less up to you, but we suggest that you continue this spirit of intertwining services and fees a little bit. And for example turning this into services monthly remuneration, so in other words the monthly remuneration for the services. You could alternatively also attach this datafield to the concept of consultant or the concept of fees that you could create on the spot here. Both of those approaches work as well, but for now let’s take this approach. Then of course we’ll turn this into a currency type datafield and if I now click save and insert, you can see here that we can fill out a number and a certain currency to create a sum of money.

But the really interesting bit is of course still this part of the second paragraph. First of all we need to create a datafield that allows us to fill out a number of hours that the consultant needs to perform per month. Let’s stick with the services concept for now, where we can then name the datafields. For example hours per month, so the hours per month invested in these services. That is naturally going to be a number type datafield, because we fill out a number of hours. Of course if we now click save in library and fill out a certain value here, let’s say that the consultant needs to perform 100 hours in a given month, then this makes a lot of sense, of course this part of the sentence.

Create a one-else special function

But if we were to say for whatever reason that the consultant only performs one hour per month, then of course the word hours needs to be replaced with the word hour. Now you could transform this into a condition, but that you run the risk of making that a little bit clunky. So there is a special function that allows you to do this in a bit more of a succinct manner. The special function that we’re going to be using here is the one dash else function, in other words a special function that focuses on a certain value of a number datafield. Depending on that value of the number datafield it either provides a bit of text for, if one is the value, or if anything else is the value.

I think an example will showcase that in a little bit more of a better light, so we’ll start by writing the @ symbol, we’ll then use the name or write the name of the special function. Then in between parentheses we’re writing three elements this time:

1. The first element or the first parameter, is called the datafields that the special function hinges on in our case. That is the datafield we just created, services hours per month, so that’s the datafield that the special function will use to either show the second or the third parameter. Then of course we separate these parameters with commas.

2. Then the second parameter will be the text that needs to be displayed for the value one, that’s in our case of course our, we’re surrounding those with quotation marks because it should be indicated as being static text.

3. The third parameter again separated with commas, is the text value that needs to be portrayed if the number is anything other than one, in the else situation.

So as you can see here we’re essentially asking one else of the services hour per month, if the answer is one then we’re showing the word hour, if the answer is anything else then we show the word hours. And of course then we also get rid of the hard-coded word hours, since we won’t be needing that anymore. Then you can see here in the interactive preview this now says one hour, but if we were to change that to two hours then it says two hours.

⏭ Next on we will be exploring cross-references.

So for example we don’t even need to rearrange all these clauses first, because as you know currently the order of the clause is not yet in line with the source documents. That is actually something that we can come back to later and the Q&A will automatically follow all of the changes that we make. Now in order to start creating a questionnaire we can first of all save this document, to make sure that we’re working with the most up-to-date version. Then we’ll click these three dots and send this document to Q&A, which then inserts us into design Q&A mode where we have essentially an empty workbench, that we can use to craft different questions. And relating to the datafields that they correspond to, because as you remember datafields are essentially just ways of asking questions of the users. Those questions are then grouped into cards much the same way as datafields are grouped into concepts, to provide context.

Create questions

This is where we will be creating those cards and those questions, and as you can see there are multiple panes. You can actually hover over these panes to showcase what other different panes exist. Now there are quite a few of them, the only ones that we currently need to finish up on this tutorial, is the cards menu or the cards pane, and the batch create pane.

• In the cards pane we will have an overview of all of the different cards that are already created

• In the batch create menu we have an easy way to actually create these cards and if you click this uncategorized option you will see that we have an overview of all of the datafields, used in this document and their corresponding concept that they are attached to.

Now if we want to create several questions and an appropriate card for those questions in one go, we can actually just click card with all these fields. And as you can see we just did that for the agreement concept, so all of the datafields attached to the agreement concept have now been inserted.

If we take a look at the simulate menu you can see that this is what that would essentially look like for the end user. Now since those questions actually take the name or the title of those questions take the name of the datafields. You may be interested in in making this a little bit more cosmetically appealing, cleaning those questions up a little bit. Again you’re welcome to do so, any changes here made in the Q&A don’t immediately affect the document assembly mode or the underlying concepts, or anything like that. So you’re very much free to remove these dashes which you would need for a datafield, but don’t need for this Q&A style approach.

So here in the cards menu you can see that we’ve just created our first card. We can also go back to the batch create menu and see that we don’t necessarily need to make individual cards each time. We can also select an individual question and indicate that we want to add it to an existing card, like for example the agreement card. If we then go back to the cards menu you can see that the jurisdiction datafield is added and that also all the predefines that were attached to this datafield, have also been taken over from this concept. Now if we go back to the batch create menu, we can finish up on the creation of all the necessary datafields by just creating all of these cards with all of these different fields:

• Create one for consultant;

• Create one for company;

• Create one for the non-compete clause;

• Create one for the services.

You can also see that if we go back to the cards menu, that we can move these. We can move these cards around, we can change the order by just using these arrow icons. We can also do the same for the order of the questions and of course the main thing that we still need to do once we have actually created all of these questions is to clean them up a little bit. Make sure that they are cosmetically appealing.

The question “legal-person” is a prime example of a question that should be formulated in a bit of a better way. For example here we’re not going to ask legal dash person, we’re going to ask: is the consultant a legal person? That makes a lot more sense, aside from that question really the only optimization that we need to do or the primary optimizations that we need to do is:

• remove these dashes that were necessary for datafields but are not necessary here. If you want to make sure that the imported or the batch created questions immediately adhere to a proper sort of structure, where we don’t really need to improve the quality of this question. Remove these dashes, you can also attach labels to your datafields that’s not something that we looked at in this particular tutorial series.

So with all of that out of the way, we now have an essentially perfect questionnaire. As you can see here, we can interact with every single datafield in the entire questionnaire.

Add conditions to questions

Now there is one type of improvement that we can still make. If you take a look at this question is the consultant a legal person? You will remember that as being one of our conditional logic questions, then you can see here that the question can be answered with yes and that the legal person text will be displayed. But in that case the birth date question is still being asked vice versa. If we answer “no” here, then the natural person text will be displayed. But the company number representative name and representative function questions are still asked. So here we can again use conditional logic to optimize the way in which this questionnaire is going to portray all of its different questions. We can do that immediately for example for the company number question.

We’ll attach a condition to that question:

• First select this question and then click the abbreviation of condition here.

• Just go through the condition creation wizard so to speak, so here we have a bunch of different elements that we can use to establish our condition. 99 Of conditions are used by answering or are established on the basis of an answer to a certain question. The answer or the rather the question in our case is of course: is the consultant a legal person? The answer for this question to be activated is: needs to be equal to true. So in other words if the user answers yes to the question: is the consultant a legal person? Then this question will be shown.

• Instead of recreating that entire condition for the representative name and the representative function, we can copy this condition and just paste it for the representative name and paste it for the representative function.

We can do the same for the birth date only this time of course the answer needs to be false. Because it should only be shown if the consultant is a natural person. If we take a look at that now, you can see depending on whether or not we answer yes or no different questions appear altogether. So that no superfluous questions are being asked of the user. We can actually do one more example of that as well, so one of the questions with conditional logic attached to it as well, was the optional clauses list. One of those options of course that we created was the non-compete clause.

Add conditions to cards

If we scroll all the way down to the non-compete card, you can see that really these questions are only relevant if the answer to this question optional clauses was answered with at the very least the non-compete option. So instead of just attaching a condition to a question, we can also attach a condition to a card. By selecting the card in its entirety and adding the condition, only show this card if the answer to the question optional clauses has an item equal to. Since this is a list of text field, we are presented with different options compared to the true or false type datafields. We’ll just say has an item equal to non-compete and if we then simulate this you can see that if we select the non-compete option, this clause appears. Also this question or rather this card appears in the questionnaire. If we deactivate that then you see that no such card appears. There’s actually one more optimization that we can do, specifically in relation to that question.

Deactivate free answers

Now you will have seen in the simulate menu that we are given the option to fill out a free answer to this question as well. The reason for that and the reason why that is not the case for the jurisdiction datafield, for example. Is that we didn’t indicate in the predefined overview of this datafield, that free answers were not allowed. But of course we would prefer free answers to not be allowed, because we don’t have any conditional logic that can be used to generate optional clauses. So instead of going to the conditions menu, we will select this clause and go to the options menu where all sorts of different options exist. But the one that we need is the free answers which will indicate as being not allowed. If we then go to the simulate menu again you can see that no free options remain and that we can only fill out the non-compete option.

Now of course the Q&A mode is primarily focused on offering users the ability to interact with the datafields in a given document, there are other ways to interact with the documents that are currently not present in this Q&A. Like for example, flexibly switching between the terminology assigned to the consultant. You will remember that we did all sorts of things in the independence clause relating to the grammatical changes that need to occur, that’s flexibility. That’s currently reserved for the document assembly mode.

Now there are ways to also implement that sort of flexibility or give users the option to interact with that sort of flexibility in the Q&A mode but they’re not the scope. In the scope of this particular tutorial series, for that you will need to go to the changes pane. You will also see that definitions are not available for further interaction, that’s also something that for now is the sole domain of the document assembly mode.

Save the questionnaire

But other than that we are essentially done with this questionnaire. We just have to actually create this file and we’ll call this the consultancy agreement Q&A. As we click save Q&A, this file has now been created. Just to jump back to the point that we made earlier, I can show how the underlying document can still be altered a little bit, or the structure can still be altered a little bit. The Q&A will automatically take that shape of that document, so as you can see here currently the order of these clauses is still completely not in line with the source documents.

Interaction with document assemble

Let’s close this questionnaire and go back to our document assembly mode, where we can open up the import panel and try to recreate the order of our source document clauses.

1. The services clause

2. The duration clause

3. The independence clause

4. The fees clause

5. The termination clause

6. The non-compete clause

7. The confidentiality clause

8. The severability clause

9. The applicable law and competent court clause

If we now save this document and open the questionnaire back up again, you will see that the correct order is now applied.

One final optimization that we can also perform here is, we can take a look at the datafields menu and see all of the values that have already been assigned to these datafields. Now if you take another look at the questionnaire you can see that if we don’t fill out any information, for example in relation to the commencement date or the duration. Then Clause9 is still going to draw from the values that were inserted in document assembly mode to fill out something.

Now if that’s something that you want to avoid, if you just want these values to be empty. You can also I’ll just close this Q&A very quickly, you can also go into the datafields menu for the document assembly mode and click this icon right here and then say clear all datafields. So that all the values in all the datafields will be removed. If we then open up the questionnaire again you can see that all of these values are now empty.

So these are just some ways to improve the look and feel and the experience related to your Q&A, some more. With all of that out of the way, you should have been able to create this consultancy agreement, to complete this tutorial series.

Now you’ve seen quite a few functionalities that Clause9 has to offer. There is of course still more to learn. The help center is a good first step if you want to dive into some more details. Also the links that were included in the previous chapters, definitely offer some more information as well. And of course there are a range of different tutorials that can help you further along the road as well!

Now, the first question that you might be asking yourself based on the previous chapter is “where do we apply this style, do we apply it at binder level or at the level of the individual sub-document?”. The short answer to that question is binder, the long answer is that Clause9 essentially applies a kind of cascade system for using the correct styling elements.

1️⃣ At the first level, Clause9 is going to check what sort of elements of the style have been decided upon at binder level, and everything that we’ve fine-tuned at binder level that’s applied.

2️⃣ Then it’s going to take a look of which elements of the style haven’t been fine-tuned in any way at the binder level, but have been fine-tuned at the level of an individual sub-document and it will apply those elements where the individual sub-document applies certain rules but the binder doesn’t say anything about that.

3️⃣ If in a third stage there are still certain elements of the style where neither the binder nor an individual sub documents has fine-tuned anything or has decided upon any sort of diverging styling settings, then Clause9 will apply the default style which is either your organizations’ default style or, in case your organization hasn’t created the default style yet, it will just use the Clause9 default style, which is of course what the Consultancy Agreement originally was created in. So, as you can see, Clause9 tries to harmonize styling settings as much as possible across all of these different elements.

Base styling

With all that out of the way, we can now move on to the applying the appropriate settings and we’ll take another quick look at the base document where you can see that the base styling setting the first setting that we need to adjust is to put the font for this document on Times New Roman and the font size at 10. Let’s open up the “base styling” menu where you can see here that quite a few different styling options are available. The ones that we’re interested in relate to font. First of all, we are going to indicate that the font name is Times New Roman, the font size is set to 10, and then if we apply those changes across the document you can immediately see that both documents follow suit and immediately have that entire style applied to them. That’s essentially it for base styling. You can set up more styles and you can fine-tune that a little bit more, but that’s really all we need right now for this document. I should say that base styling also has an effect on other elements of the style because it provides a blueprint for which other styling elements can then follow. For example, the fact that we now set this font to Times New Roman will also indicate to the heading style and to the definition style for example to keep that into account and to follow what is decided upon in the base style.

Headings styling

Moving on to the headings style, let’s take another look at our source document. Here we need to give the titles of our clauses this kind of blue highlight color with white font color and also we need to set them to lower case cap style. You’ll remember from the original source document that all of the titles are displayed in all caps right now. We need to change that in the headings menu.

That’s primarily done here in the styling per level. Again, we can scroll down a little bit, we have alignment, paragraph, spacing… None of those are particularly interesting right now, but of course title font is. Now, you will also have noticed this sequence of numbers 1-9. That’s if you’re familiar with Microsoft Word essentially the same approach as Microsoft Word uses. You can define different styling settings for different heading levels appearing all the way down to level 9. Now, since we’re changing the way that the titles of our content titles looked, we are of course working with level 1 headings. So, you can also see that the title font has already been set to Times New Roman thanks to the base styling. The color will be set to white, the size is fine, the cap style again will be changed to regular instead of capitals and then if we scroll down a little bit more we find the “background of titles settings”. There we can indicate that we would like blue headings. There are quite a few different kinds of blue, the blue that we’re looking for here is steel blue but if you want to know 100% certainty which kind of colour you need, you can always click this icon and adjust the red green and blue values so that you can accurately recreate a certain colour in Clause9.

If we apply those changes immediately, you can see on the left-hand side that our document already resembles the source document a little bit more. Naturally, level 1 is not the only heading level that we need to be concerned with. Specifically, our level 2 heading included here, under the miscellaneous clause, also needs to be adjusted because it is still being portrayed in all caps. If we go into level 2 and then go back up to the cap style, we can adjust this to regular as well and then it follows the styling settings for our source.

Definition list styling

So, moving back into the document itself, we have taken care of these first three elements. Now we move on to definitions. Specifically, the template author is asking us to show definitions in a list-in-table format without borders and here some of the complexities of the relation of the individual sub-documents into the binder and the styling settings that belong to it is laid bare a little bit. If we scroll all the way back up, you can see that currently our definitions are portrayed as bullets. If we go into the definition styling settings, we can indicate that we would like to show the definitions not as bullets, but as table rows. That’s already one element of the new styling covered. Now the second element is that we also need to remove the borders in this style. As you will remember, the definition list is essentially an auto-generated ad-hoc clause that we can also fine tune a little bit as we can fine-tune any clause in in Clause9. However, since it is an ad hoc clause, it is intrinsically tied to the structure of the document. So, as opposed to library clauses, we cannot edit it in the binder. We know the rules when it comes to that, we can go back into our Consultancy Agreement, our individual source document, and there we can adjust the way in which the default the definition list is portrayed.

Now, you’ll immediately notice that this clause is wildly different from the clause in the binder and that’s because the binder shouldn’t diverge on structure and inclusion of certain clauses but it can have its own terms applied and its own definitions applied which is what we did. It can have its own styling settings applied as well, so that’s why we don’t have that second definition, that’s why this is still portrayed in bullets as opposed to table rows.

That said, we can still navigate into this ad-hoc clause by double clicking it. We can still go into the custom styling settings where for the body we can set up some custom styling settings in relation to the table. Now, there is no table appearing in this particular version of the clause, but of course in the binder there is a table appearing. So we can indicate that we would like to remove all of the borders – no borders around, no inside borders horizontally, no inside borders vertically, and if we update that clause now you can see that nothing changes in the actual clause. We can save this document and then close it down. As soon as we take a look at the definition list in the binder you can see that this setting has been applied, so a very good indication of changing the structure of a document from the individual source document rather than from the binder. Those two communicate, so any changes made to the definition list in the individual document immediately flows through to the binder. We have essentially completed what we needed to adjust for the styling settings when it comes to definitions.

References styling

We can jump back into our source document where we now move on to references. One of the things you will have noticed is that we are no longer using the word “article” when it comes to references to a particular clause. We are instead referencing the word “clause”. Again this is something that is fairly easy to be adjusted. We just go back into the styling menu, we go to the references menu where we can simply indicate what word we would like to use for a clause. Now we are using the singular version of “article” and the plural version of “articles”, but we can also use “clause” and “clauses” either with a capital “c” or with a lowercase “c”.

We’re doing the lowercase one here, and we will apply those changes. Immediately you can see here that if we go to the nearest cross-reference that it says notwithstanding clause 5.1 instead of article 5.1. That said, if we scroll down a little bit more you will see that we also used the hard-coded word “article”. Now, of course, this isn’t as much of an issue. We can refer to this as “article” or we can refer to this as “clause” but if you like to maintain that consistency then you can open up this document and you can essentially say you can essentially surround the word article with two underscores which will highlight this in green and indicate to Clause9 – please change this word in accordance with the styling settings that have been applied in the reference level.

Then, you can see here, it will use the word “clause” but it will say this the clause because this tactic uses the same rules for creating the right articles as concepts do. So, we can drop the article “this” and instead write a degree symbol which we’ll change this to “in the event of a breach of this clause” just aligning that word with whatever word we’ve decided to use in the references styling level. That essentially sets up our styling for the references quite nicely.

Page number styling

Moving on to the final element – the page styling. We have some page numbers that are included in the main Consultancy Agreement which look like “page 1 of 4” and then in the Annex we have page numbers as well, but they use just the actual number of the page. So, those two are different from one another. Again, this is a good example of how page styling differs from one individual sub document to another. To cover this, we are not going to be using the styling in the binder. We are going to open up the individual documents in Clause9 and we are going to navigate into the styling menu for those documents. If we now open up the default style for this Consultancy Agreement, we can again adjust quite a few different settings. The one that we need is the header and footer, specifically the right part of the footer. There we can include some new content. So, we are going to indicate that we want to adjust the right part and specifically, we want to fill out some content here. But Clause9 also offers a few options for what you can include in this footer. The one that we need is the page number and then Clause9 will construct the page number for you. What we will then do is choose “page number of” and then “total pages” which will allow us to recreate this style that you see right here – page 1 of 4.

Then, we can apply those changes. Now, headers and footers aren’t displayed in the interactive preview but that essentially covers it for this this Consultancy Agreement. We’ll save that document. We’ll do the same in the styling menu of the Services Annex where in the page menu we are scrolling down to the right part of the footer, only in this case we’re not using the page number of the total amount of pages, we’re just using the page number itself. Of course, we will indicate that we would like to start the page number at 1 and that it shouldn’t continue from the original document, or rather the Consultancy Agreement. If we apply those changes and then save the document, of course that means that this binder now also has something to fall back on in terms of page styling and that all the new elements of the styling have been introduced.

✅ That essentially covers it for the styling!

Create a new clause

So moving on, the clause which we are going to automate is going to be the applicable law clause. As you can see in the source documents there are two placeholders here one for the jurisdiction of the applicable law and one for the location of the competent court.

Now you may or nearly be tempted to just create two datafields there but the template author has created quite a list of instructions for how this clause should be filled out. So we don’t have the freedom to just fill out any value that we like. We should in fact only be able to choose between three different options. That’s going to be France, Germany and Belgium, depending on which option is chosen here a different location of the competent court should be portrayed in article 9.2. So if France is selected then we choose Paris, Germany selected then we choose Berlin and if Belgium is selected then we choose Brussels.

Let’s get right to it, we’ll start by creating a new library clause. We’re dealing with the applicable law and competent court clause. The boilerplate folder seems like a good location to place that clause in, again important parts are the file name, content title and content body.

• For file name, we’ll choose applicable law and competent court.

• For the content title and content body, copy this from the Word documents or use the import mode.

I’ll open up the global panel, scroll all the way down and as you can see much like in our previous clause there are still a few comments that were left by the template author embedded into this imported document. Of course we don’t want to import to these rather to the content body fields. What we’ll do is, we’ll disable them by double clicking the circle icon next to these paragraphs.

And then there are two options also as previously discussed. We can either select all of the text and click transfer selection, what we can also do is click the import icon next to the title of the clause and that’s going to import all of the subclauses for this clause. If we do that here watch what happens, the content title is imported as it should be.

The content body however only features one paragraph and the reason for that is that you can see 9.1 it’s clearly a subclause of article 9. It’s indented one level to the right but if we scroll down to 9.2 we can see that it is actually still all the way to the to the left, so it’s not registered as a sub-clause. We can change that by just moving all of these paragraphs one level to the right using these arrow icons. If we now try that again, now you can see what 9.1 is, it’s indented under the article 9. Same for 9.2, if we now try to import it again then you can see that the necessary content is imported, so we can close the global panel and continue working on our clause.

Add predefines

As you remember the instructions that were handed to us by the template author, said that we should create predefined options, so not just any value that can be filled out, but predefined options. Of course first we need to start by creating a datafield, and in this case I’ll choose applicable law jurisdiction. You could have also chosen something like agreement, there’s very few wrong answers so to speak.

Create concept: Obviously, we haven’t created this concept yet. So we’ll create a new concept, stored in our concepts folder, we don’t really need to include a concept label. Because we’re not going to use this concept as a term, so we’re only going to use it as a storage container for datafields.

Create datafield: Then of course the datafield in question, as mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, is going to be a text type datafield.

Now if I save this in the library, you will see that we can fill out this datafield as we choose. No predefined options have been created yet, in order to do that you can click this reference to the concept applicable law. In this sort of hyperlink format at the bottom of the screen, which will open that concept up in edit mode. Then if we go to the datafields menu, we have an overview of all the datafields attached to this concept and a bunch of different options that we can add to this datafield. The one that we need is of course the predefined option, that will allow us to provide predefined answers. As soon as we click that you can see we have one predefined area but we can create two more. The predefines that the template author asked us to create are: Belgium, France and Germany.

Now if you are planning to use Clause9 in different languages and even if you’re not planning to use it in in different languages, but you want to continue using this clause in multiple different settings for example.

This approach while it works, may have some problems going forward to make it future proof. So in the description we’ve included some information on how to probably better approach this issue but for now this will definitely suffice.

For now we’ve created three predefines that we’re going to be able to fill out here. We can also indicate that only the predefined values can be stored, so that no free values can be filled out. Which is of course exactly what the template author asked us to do. If we now click save in library we can close this concept and watch what happens if we now save this clause as well in order to update it with the new information that we included in the concept. You can see that the free text bar, that allowed us to fill out a free value, has disappeared. Instead we only have the option to select either Belgium, France or Germany.

Conditionality

With that information ready, we can now proceed to the condition that we’re going to be creating here in article 9.2 or 3.2, as it is shown currently in this document.

Again the structure of a datafield or of a condition rather is one of three parts, so we’ll always start by writing our curly brackets.

• The Question: Then within those curly brackets we’ll always start by first implicitly asking a question. In this case of course the question is the one that we just created, which is the jurisdiction of the applicable law. So we’ll use applicable law jurisdiction.

• The Answer: And then we can proceed to the second part of the condition, which is the part where we fill out a hypothetical answer to that question. For a text type datafield that takes the form of equals, much as it would have been for a true or false type datafield, but then between parentheses. The text that is going to be filled out here, so in our case Belgium.

• The Result: Then we can move on to the third part of the condition by inserting a colon and then we include for example the word Brussels.

Then of course we’ve only defined one of our three options. We can again bifurcate this condition to provide a different hypothetical answer to the question “what is the jurisdiction”? In that case it will be equals France colon Paris, and one final option equals Germany, colon Berlin. If we now save this you can see that a purple bar appears next to the clause which indicates of course the presence of conditional logic. If we now choose one of these predefines, for example Belgium, you can see that the clause says this agreement is subject to the law of Belgium and the courts at Brussels shall be exclusively competent. We can go to the datafields menu and play around with this some more.

So that sums up the creation of a condition using a text type datafield.

⏭ Next on we’ll take one final look at another different type of condition using another different type of datafield.

If you take a look at this Annex 1- Services, you can see that this alternative option is still included in the document whereas we should actually only be using this table.

Remember, removing a clause from a document is changing the structure and that is not something that we can do by default in the binder. We should be doing it from the individual sub-document where we can indicate we would like to remove this clause.

Save this document to communicate the update to the binder. That update is not going to show immediately, but if we quickly close and open the binder back up you can see that the alternative option is removed. Another thing that we can do is remove these data fields because they were just placeholders and we don’t really have any need for them anymore. So, we will save this document. We can close it and move to the design Q&A panel where we can indicate that we would like to edit the existing Consultancy Agreement Q&A. Of course, this Q&A is still built as a layer on top of the original Consultancy Agreement. We’ve been making some changes to that document so we’ll take need to take those into account but more importantly we created a binder specifically so that we could bring the two sub-documents together. Currently, our Q&A is still a layer on top of the individual Consultancy Agreement but we would like it to be a layer on top of the binder and that’s definitely possible.

Adapting the Q&A to the binder

If we move to the file menu, we can indicate that we would like to change the document underlying this Q&A and if we click that, then we can indicate that we would like the binder to be the engine of this Q&A.

That will close the Q&A, but you can open it back up and if you go to the simulate menu, you can see that we now have the two binder documents at our disposal. If we scroll down a little bit, just move through the questions, you can see that basically all the data fields that we originally added are still there because we didn’t make any major changes except for the services list, because we are no longer setting out the list of services in clause 1, but rather we are setting that out in a repeating list table in the Services Annex. Not a problem, we can move to the edit menu where if we scroll all the way down, we can select this question related to this data field, and outright remove it from the Q&A. We can then add our repeating list data fields in relation to the names of the services and the descriptions, and your instinctive response for that would probably be to navigate to the batch create menu.

If we go back into the cards menu, you can create a new question which is going to act as a table. It’s that advanced nature of this repeating list data field that’s really prohibiting us from doing this via the batch create menu. But, of course, we can easily do it here manually. We will create a table, primarily because that is how repeating list data fields are pertaining Q&A. You can also see that this icon corresponds to the icon for repeating this data field, so we will move that question all the way to the top because it makes sense to ask that question first. Then, we will indicate that the title is details – the details were surrounding the services, and then we can create two new columns which correspond to the columns that we are using in the table.

In the Q&A mode, you’re always going to have to set them out in a table format and you can then indicate a caption which is how the name of the data field differs from the way in which the question in Q&A is asked. Much like for example here, we also differentiated our question a little bit from the way that the data fields was phrased. So here we are going to indicate, for example, that the caption is the “type of service” and we are asking for the description of that service and that sets up our repeating list data field question.If we go intothe simulate menu, you can see that we can create all sorts of new options, for example alpha, beta, gamma (…) and those correspond to the columns in the table. That’s it for our repeating list data field.

That sets all of that up quite nicely. There are just a few more things that we then need to consider. If we quickly look back at the original source document, you can see that one of the first comments in the document says that we should be able to switch between the name of the consultant, so that whatever is filled out, and the term the consultant itself. Now, in the document assembly mode, you have the terms menu for that, and that’s actually fairly easy to accomplish. In Q&A mode, it’s a little more rigid, but you can still create that kind of flexibility even in the absence of a terms menu. If we go back into the questionnaire, we can go into the changes menu.

Replacing terms in clauses through Q&A

So we’ve been primarily working out of the cards pane and the batch create pane. Now we’re going into the changes pane because that allows us to set up quite a few more different subtle manipulations of the text. We’re going to create a new change set and we have all sorts of different types here that allow us to do all sorts of different stuff. The one that we need is the change term set because we’re going to change the term “the consultant” to something else. The title of that change set doesn’t really matter all that much. We’re just going to call it “referencing the consultant” just so that we can remember for ourselves what exactly this change set does. The term that we’re changing is the consultant and here we can set up how that term needs to be portrayed. You’ll remember this kind of setup from the concept labels overview.

Now, we can’t really fill out anything concrete because we don’t know what the name of the consultant is going to be. So, instead of filling out a value here, we are going to select a question that will contain the value that needs to be filled out. In our case that is the name of the consultant. Of course, the article needs to be dropped here in any case, because you’re never going to put an article in front of a person or a party’s name. This change set is essentially ready.

The only thing that is missing is an option to switch between the different kinds of options that are available, so either the consultant or the name. The user still needs to be able to switch between the two, and for that we are navigating back into the cards menu where we are explicitly going to ask by way of a final question in the consultant card a yes or no question from the user. This is going to be something along the lines of “reference the consultant by their name – yes or no” and depending on the answer to that question, our change set is either going to be activated or it is not going to be activated.

In order for us to make that sort of link between this question and the change set, we are just

1️⃣ navigating back into the changes menu

2️⃣ selecting this entire change set and then

3️⃣ adding a condition to it following the same condition builder that we’ve used previously

Specifically, we are going to indicate that the answer to the question reference the consultant by their name must be equal to true in order for us to actually activate this change set. If we now go into the simulate menuand we scroll all the way up, we indicate that the consultant is not a legal person and their name is John, then by default it’s going to say John and then reference the consultant. But, we can indicate that we would like to reference the consultant by their name, in which case all across the document the reference will be made to John as opposed to the consultant. Of course, if we say no, then the reference is still going to be the consultant. That’s basically that, so that sets up our first change quite nicely.

Creating conditions in Q&A

We’re going to look at another change very quickly, something a little bit more advanced. It’s this comment in the source documents, where the template author is indicating that we need to have multiple plans, where depending on which plan is chosen – the values filled out for amount and for hours should be differentiated. So, we are again going to navigate into our cards menu in the Q&A and under services we are going to create a new question below the repeating list data field question that we just created. We are going to make our three plans available, so we are going to create a text-based question because we need to be able to offer three different options. Then, we are going to call this remuneration fees plan, and we are going to create three different predefines – plan A, plan B and plan C. Of course, this question is going to be attached to another change set.

If we go back into our changes menu, we can create a new change set which allows us to change the value in a data field. Specifically, we’re going to create a plan change set which is going to change the value for services hours-per-month or monthly remuneration. Let’s start with that one because that’s the order the source document. If we take a quick look at that, you can see it starts with the monthly remuneration and the hours invested, so the monthly remuneration needs to be adjusted to a fixed value. Again, if we take another look at the source document, it is set at 5 000 euros, so we will select 5000 and them add another change to this – a data field change, which is going to set us up for hours per month and that is going to be a fixed value of 40 hours. These are the data field values for our plan A. Now again, we just need to create a condition that allows us to activate or deactivate plan A. Select the condition and we are again going to go through the creation wizard. The answer to the question “fees plan” needs to be equal to plan a. Then we can also create a change set for plan B.

So, this is going to be plan B the value is 2800 and 20 and then, of course, the condition needs to be adjusted as well.

We’re not going to select plan A, but plan B, and then finally you would think that we could also create one for plan C, but the entire purpose of plan C is to allow the user to decide freely. So, we’re not going to create a change set for that, because we’re not going to fill out any sort of value. Instead, we are navigating into the cards pane again and then we are going to indicate that these questions – monthly remuneration and hours dedicated per month – are only going to be visible in case plan C was selected is equal to plan C. Then, we just copy that condition and paste it into this second question and one more final optimization that we can do is indicate this fees plan question. We can open up the options menu and we can indicate that no free answers are allowed which will allow us to control all of the different options available from this question. As you can see, if we now navigate into the simulate menu, we can select plan A which is automatically going to set us up with 5000 euros 40 hours, plan B which is going to set us up with 2800 and 20 hours and plan C which will allow us to fill out a value of our choice.

✅ So that’s a short look into the different options when it comes to change sets and that also concludes this tutorial series!