Contract Documents
A Conga CLM template is a blueprint for contracts, containing sections, clauses, text, and placeholders (merge fields) for terms and conditions. These templates are merged with structured data to generate agreements or proposals, ensuring consistency and compliance across your contracts.
Templates are stored in the Conga Drive system, which acts as a central repository. You can:
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View, upload, and manage templates in the Conga Drive app.
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See details like template type, file type, status, sharing rules, and last updated date.
Types of Templates and Clauses
Contract Templates: For agreements like NDAs, MSAs, SOWs.
Clause Templates: Standard or alternate legal language blocks.
Web Clauses: For simple, static text clauses.
X-Author Clauses: For dynamic, merge field-enabled, or conditional clauses.
Advanced Features
Smart Fields/Clauses: Allow negotiation and reconciliation of changes.
Conditional Clauses/Segments: Show/hide content based on contract data.
Repeat Tables/Sections: For line items or related object data.
Best Practices
Standardize Styles: Use consistent styles across clauses and templates to avoid formatting issues.
Limit Query Templates: Avoid exceeding 44 query templates to prevent UI issues; consolidate where possible.
Leverage Out-of-the-Box Features: Avoid over-customization; use Conga's built-in features for maintainability.
Test Conditional Logic: Always verify that conditional clauses and segments work as expected.
Stay Updated: Keep up with product releases and documentation for new features and improvements.
Creating and Publishing Templates
lets you build templates directly in Word, insert merge fields, and manage clauses.
supports conditional clauses, smart fields (editable and trackable), and read-only fields.
allows for complex logic, such as including/excluding clauses based on contract data.
Clauses
Clauses are modular blocks of text that are used frequently across multiple templates. You create clauses as described in Creating New Templates. After a clause is created, you can use Clause Library to insert clauses into a template.
For more information about using the Clause Library see, Clauses.
Best Practices
When you insert a clause that contains a Microsoft Word table, you must add a single line space before and after the table.
Do not start or end a clause with a smart field. Instead, the clause must have an empty line or some text at the start and the end of the clause.
Do not start or end a clause with a repeat table. You must add an empty line or some text before and after a table.
Two clauses must not be side by side without space.
You must insert a blank line (not a new line) between two consecutive clauses.
Avoid using a repeat table or Microsoft Word table inside a clause, as it may result in unexpected behavior.
Using Refresh Clause on a clause containing a Microsoft Word table may result in an incomplete update of the table cell values.
When you check in a template with a clause containing the last element like a table object/smart field in a clause, the template crashes, to avoid this issue, add whitespace just after the table and before the new line.
- While inserting clauses in an agreement template under a numbered/sub-numbered list, ensure the following:
Any clause ending with numbering, sub-numbering, and bullets should have one line space at the end of clause.
All other clauses apart from the above condition must not end with an empty line.
A nested clause is not supported beyond two levels (any clause template can have multiple child clauses (A -> B, C), but a clause template clause A cannot have child clause B which already has another child clause. (A->B->C).
For custom styles it is recommended that all clause templates and agreements use the same custom style so that inserting a clause from playbook does not disrupt the overall template formatting.
Fields
Fields represent the contractual terms and metadata from your contract record in Conga CLM. They are also called "merge fields". When you generate a contract document, the values of the fields are retrieved from the contract record and populated in the document. As a template administrator, you are responsible for building your template to include fields, as static text, as read-only fields or as smart fields that can be changed and reconciled to the contract record during the negotiation process.
For more information about using fields in contract template see, Fields.
Template Segments
Set Segment feature allows you to set conditions and style for any text you highlight in your contract template. The condition for the segment's visibility can be set from the expression builder. The segment can consist of the highlighted text, a clause, a group of text across clauses, or text with fields. You can leverage this feature to create a template that can show or hide different segments of text in the generated contract based on the conditions set by you. The expression builder is fully integrated with the objects and fields in your Conga CLM.
For more information about making a segment conditional, creating a nested segment, and managing existing segments see, Setting Segments in Templates.
Template Filter Rules
Users generate contract documents and supporting documents during the contract management life cycle. While generating a contract document or supporting documents, the application displays a list of templates the user can select. The list of templates displayed depends on the configuration of the template filter rule.
Using template filtering rules, you can set up user-defined filters to narrow the list of templates that are displayed for tasks that involve generating contract documents or supporting documents. Administrators set conditions that determine which templates are displayed during contract document and supporting document generation.
The template filter rule looks for a match between fields on the contract and template records. For example, for contract templates created for multiple languages, you should only be able to select templates for the language to which they belong. The template filter uses contract fields and related child object fields to select the templates to display.
For more information about creating and managing template filter rules see Template Filter Rules.