Introduction to concepts

What are concepts, why are they so important, and which elements of data do they store?

What are concepts?

Concepts are central to the functioning of Clause9. They have a dual purpose:

• They represent defined terms in a legal document (typically words that get capitalised in formally drafted contracts, e.g.: “the Employee”, “the Commencement Date”, “Confidential Information”, etc.)

• They provide a central storage location for datafields.

Both purposes will often — but certainly not always — overlap. Hence, a concept should be created either because that word would typically be written with a capital, or because you need to define a few centralised storage locations related to that concept. Both purposes at the same time will also happen very frequently.

For example, a typical employment agreement will almost certainly have to use the concepts #employer and #employee — not only because both words would typically be written with a capital in formally drafted contracts, but also because various datafields relating to an employer or an employee will be relevant (e.g., an employer’s address, an employee’s function, an employee’s commencement date, etc).

Breakdown of concept information

When you create a new concept, you are presented with several options to provide information about them (see the column on the right-hand side in the image above). Below, we go over each pane.

• File name — The pane shown in the screenshot above. It allows you to set the file name of the concept's file, optionally in multiple languages. Similar to the filenames you would use on your Windows pc or Mac, file names should not be too long, to allow users to quickly glance over lists of files.

• Description — An optional pane that allows you to provide a description for a concept, for example in which kind of documents this concept should be used, or how this Concept is different from another concept. This content can later be searched on. Unlike file names, there is no real limit to the length of the description you can provide.

• Category — Allows you to group different concepts into common categories. If a document simultaneously refers to many different concepts, it may get difficult to find the concept you are looking for. Grouping into categories can then help.

• Links — Allows you to link the concept to clauses and other concepts to express relationships.

• Datafields — Remember the second purpose of a concept in Clause9? This pane will allow you to attach dynamically updated information to a concept (such as names, addresses, company numbers, etc.).

• Concept labels — This pane relates to the first purpose of concepts in Clause9, which is to provide a tool to show defined terms in a legal document (typically in capitals). Which term will actually be used for a certain concept can be freely defined by the legal user who assembles a document, but in general it is a good idea to provide a small collection of predefined terms for each concept (e.g.: for the concept “contract”, we could provide concept-labels of “contract”, “agreement”, “master services agreement”, “non-disclosure agreement”, “share purchase agreement”, etc.).

• Access rights — manually determine who the owner of a concept will be (if you want to designate someone other than yourself) who will then have editing rights over this file. You can also determine access rights for everyone except the owner.

• Data expressions — A "data expression" is an advanced functionality. Its purpose is to avoid having to recreate certain calculations across different clauses and will only be available to legal engineer user profiles. For more information, click here.