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Template authoring & drafts

Author new agreements from your own templates: mark the template's dynamic fields, approve them, generate a draft into your bound Drafts folder, then negotiate it to signature.

This is the outbound, paper-first flow: you start from a template you own and produce a finished draft to send a counterparty. It complements clause-level drafting (counter-positions on an existing obligation), which operates downstream during negotiation.

1 · Field-marking

The first time you open a template’s fields, clmSpace marks its dynamic fields in two layers:

  • Pattern pass: finds placeholders verbatim, including [BRACKETED] tokens, dotted and underscore fill-lines, and «merge» / {{token}} markers. Each becomes an exact source span.
  • Claude Sonnet pass: labels each field, infers its type (text, date, currency, party, address and more), marks whether it is required, and flags legally sensitive fields such as liability, governing law, fees, term and exclusivity.
It suggests; it never rewrites
Every marked field arrives as a suggestion and the template body is left exactly as you wrote it. The pattern pass always stands on its own, so detection works reliably whether or not the Claude Sonnet labelling layer is applied.

2 · Review & approve

A human reviews each suggested field against its verbatim span, edits the label, type, required flag and legal-sensitive flag, removes anything spurious, and confirms it. Approval is a firm gate:

  • Each field is confirmed or rejected by the reviewer.
  • The template is approved only once every field has been reviewed; any field still left as a suggestion holds approval back.
  • Approval records who approved it and when; re-running detection returns the template to review so the new field set is checked again.

In the UI this is the field-review modal on the Templates page.

3 · Generate a draft

With the fields approved, the guided Create agreement wizard shows one input per field and generates the draft. Generation is deliberately deterministic, applying your values exactly as entered:

  • Approved-fields gate: generation runs once the template’s fields are approved.
  • Run-aware span substitution: values are written into the exact spans (handling placeholders split across Word runs, in the body, tables, headers and footers) so styling is preserved.
  • Fails closed: if a required placeholder cannot be filled, generation stops rather than shipping a half-filled contract. Fields with no span, such as dotted signature lines, are returned as items to finish in Word, and any leftover bracket is reported back to you.
  • Signature-captured fields (signatory name, signing date, signature-block company) are left for the signing step, where the e-signature service fills them.
Every draft is created inside your bound Drafts folder
Generation writes to your SharePoint Drafts folder first, filed by counterparty and matter, and only then records clmSpace’s durable copy. A draft is created only when a Drafts folder is bound and the SharePoint upload succeeds, so a draft always lands in your bound Drafts folder and nowhere else. Bind one in Settings » Document sources.

Each generated draft is stamped with a clmSpace reference token (in the footer and as a document property) so that when the counterparty sends a redline back, the amendment is matched to the original draft even if the file was renamed.

4 · Negotiate to signature

Drafts live in the Drafts workspace, where clmSpace is the system of record and SharePoint is the mirror. A draft moves through a five-station lifecycle:

  • Generated: the draft has been created.
  • Negotiating: the counterparty’s redline is in, or the draft is back with them. Returned redlines are ingested as new versions, giving you a version chain and a redline diff against the original.
  • Approved: legal has approved. Approval pins the exact approved content, and reopening clears the approval.
  • Sent: issued for signature.
  • Signed: execution complete.

Issuing for signature is firmly gated: a draft can be issued only from the Approved station, so a draft is always sent in the form legal signed off.

E-signature is available once DocuSign is configured
Issuing sends the document to DocuSign for signature. This step is available once your tenant’s DocuSign integration is configured. The rest of the lifecycle, including authoring, generation, negotiation and approval, works on its own.