Introduction to datafields

Datafields are little bits of information attached to a concept, such as the name of a party, the commencement or termination date of a contract, a product’s unit price in a sales agreement, or the applicable law and competent court in an international agreement. In traditional contract drafting via MS Word, this is the type of information a template would put between square brackets.

How to write datafields

Datafields are comprised of three elements:

1. the concept which it is linked to;

2. the caret symbol (^) to separate the concept and the datafield; and

3. the name of the datafield

For example:

• Name of the Seller: #seller^name

• Commencement date of a contract: #contract^commencement-date

• Price per share: #shares^price-per-share

• Notice period of termination: #termination^notice-period

How to create datafields

Via browse files

To manually create datafields under the menu:

• navigate to an existing concept you wish to add the datafield to;

• double-click it or select it and click the icon;

• navigate to the datafields tab on the right-hand side of the screen and select to choose one of the types of datafields; and

• give it an internal name and hit the Save button .

You are strongly advised to create a logical order for the datafields (which you can change using the left/right buttons), to ensure that datafields that are frequently filled in together, will be displayed together in the data-dashboard of Assemble Document.

While drafting a clause

When you are in the middle of drafting a clause and you quickly want to create a datafield, it may be annoying to break your flow and manually go back to your concepts folder to create the datafield. Fortunately, there is an easier way to create datafields:

• while still in the clause editor, enter the datafield as if it actually exists;

• Clause9 will not recognize it and display it in red under “#terms”:

• click the name of the datafield in red and, from the prompted menu, select the type of datafield you wish to assign.

The datafield will be added immediately, which can be a huge time saver.