Reuse any clause in a different context

Let’s say you are drafting a lease agreement and you are looking for a notice clause. Using the search functionalities inside the Assemble Document mode, you find the perfect clause. But there’s one problem. That clause was written for a share purchase agreement, with parties being referred to as the Seller and the Buyer…

No problem! In Clause9, you can easily adapt your clause to the document you are drafting by using mapping.

To avoid cluttering your production account, it is advisable following these steps in your Clause9 Sandbox account. If you do not have such Sandbox account, please contact your administrator.

For the purposes of this How To, please create the following clauses and any concepts (with concept labels) and datafields included in there:

Party description

* #lessor^name residing at #lessor^street-number, #lessor^postal-code #lessor^city (as #lessor); and

* #lessee^name residing at #lessee^street-number, #lessee^postal-code #lessee^city (as #lessee)

Lease clause

Clause title: “Lease”

1. #Lessor agrees to lease the premises (as described below) to #lessee.

Notice clause

Clause title: “Notices”

1. Any notice to be sent to #?party under #°agreement shall be sent by registered mail to the address listed below:

1.1. For #seller:

|| % align left, borders false, borders horizontal false % ||
|| #seller^street-number ||
|| #seller^postal-code #seller^city ||

1.2. For #buyer:

|| % align left, borders false, borders horizontal false % ||
|| #buyer^street-and-number ||
|| #buyer^postal-code #buyer^city ||

Insert both clauses in a new document.

Using mapping

Mapping concepts

What we want to accomplish now is that the notice clause we inserted refers to “the Lessor” and “the Lessee” instead of “the Buyer” and “the Seller”. This can be done by using a technique called “mapping”. We can make a concept in a clause (or an entire document) map to another concept, i.e. act as if it were another concept. How do we do this?

First, select the notice clause, i.e. the clause you want to adapt itself. Selecting the clause will reveal a new pane in the operations panel on the right: the advanced pane. This pane has two tabs: Layout (selected by default) and Mapping. Click on Mapping.

In the Mapping tab, we can choose to map concepts and datafields. In this case, we want the #buyer and #seller concepts to act as if they were #lessor and #lessee. The Map from selector lets you choose a concept that should be changed into another concept (selected in map to). Let’s start with the #seller concept. In Map from, select seller. In Map to, select lessor. To apply the mapping from seller to lessor, click the button.

Now check out your clause again. Where it said “the Seller”, it will now say “the Lessor”! Do the same for buyer and lessee.

You will notice that in this case the datafields in #buyer and #seller were mapped automatically to the relevant #lessor and #lessee datafields as well. Clause9 will automatically do this if the datafields have the same name and are of the same type.

This underlines the importance of having a consistent naming policy throughout your organisation for concepts and datafields. Datafields will be mapped automatically to other datafields.

Datafields can be mapped manually as well if their names are not identical. The mapping tab contains a map datafields section under the map concepts section. Similarly to mapping concepts, you can select a datafield (in map from) that should act as another datafield (in map to), i.e. take any inputs given to that other datafield.

Mapping datafields will remove the need to enter the same information multiple times in the same document, further adding to time saved by automating your documents!