A standard contracting process begins with a generated document and ends with a final contract. Between the initial document and the final signed contract, the document is redlined and negotiated. Smart clauses help track the differences between different versions of the contract document.

Smart clauses, like smart fields, are parts of a contract that can be reconciled between versions of a contract and noted in the contract record. This can be used during negotiations when clauses are redlined. Clauses that have changed will be reconciled when you choose the reconciliation option at Check-In. Clauses can only be smart in the context of a generated contract document.

In the process of negotiations, a contract may get redlined multiple times. During these redlines, a user may choose to accept the changes made to the contract. Smart clauses provide visibility into the changes made in the contract document by allowing the user to view the changed clauses in at check-in and when the clause change has been checked in, on the Contract Clauses related list. 

When you use a template that has the smartness attribute enabled for its clauses, the generated contract document will have smart clauses that can be tracked.

A Note on Contract Documents and Templates

All generated contract documents (as opposed to imported offline contracts) use document templates saved in Conga CLM. These templates contain merge fields which, upon generation, pull field values from the contract to create distributable documents.

To make a clause smart in a template

  1. Open Microsoft Word and log in to X-Author for Contracts.
  2. From the Contracts pane, click the Home button () and select Templates.
  3. In the Templates pane, go to Work > Clauses.
  4. The Clauses pane lists all the clauses present in your template. Select a clause from the list and click the settings button () next to the clause name .
  5. In the Properties pane, toggle the Smart Clause switch on and click Save.

When you enable the Read-Only Clause attribute, the value of the Smart Clause attribute is disabled. 

Your template clause will now have the smartness property. To remove the smartness property of a clause, toggle the Smart Clause switch off (greyed out).

Limitations

You can edit smart fields within a read-only clauses in the following scenarios:

  • Clauses with multiple smart fields are editable
  • Clauses with mixed fields (merge fields, smart fields, and read-only fields) allow the smart fields to be edited
  • You cannot edit smart fields within a delete read-only clause

You must set the APTS_EditableSmartCCInReadonlyClause admin entry to True to enable the ability to edit smart fields within a read-only clause. For more information, see Admin Entries.