templates

Semantics of Contracts and Clauses

One of the more challenging aspects of digitising contracts (making then computable) is understanding how to assemble a contract from a reusable set of clauses. There is inherent tension between the notion of a clause as an atomic reusable snippet of text, and the assumptions that a clause makes about its host contract, or the other clauses that must be present in the contract.

In this article I dive deeper into what assembling contracts from clauses means in terms of semantics, and sketch out some Concerto data models to capture those semantics.

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March 13, 2024 0

Taxonomy of Contract Logic

I spend a lot of time talking to colleagues and connections about contracts, and the types of logic we find in contracts and in contract management. In this post I aim to describe my point of view on this topic and to provide some signposts and terminology to help you navigate this complex space.

I will introduce three types of logic we find in contracts:

Contract Definition Logic
Contract Automation Logic
Contract Assembly Logic

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January 22, 2024 2

Mastering Contract Efficiency: Reusing Clauses and Templates for Document Generation

The maturity model for contracts and document generation looks like this:

Copy/paste a MS Word document and use find-and-replace to update the contract details (aka deal-points).
Manage templates as separate artefacts, and use a software platform to automatically find-and-replace the template variables with their values, with values supplied by contract managers via web-forms or read via API from external systems
Introduce conditional logic and calculations into the templates: which necessitates a type-system for the variables
To tame the combinatorial explosion in the number of templates, modularize the templates using a set of included micro-templates, often managed as a clause library, dynamically assembling templates based on incoming data

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September 5, 2023 0

TemplateMark Compilation

This is part two of a series of articles on Accord Project TemplateMark. In this article I will show how TemplateMark can be statically compiled to TypeScript. I recommend you read Getting Started with TemplateMark if you have not yet done so.

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May 18, 2023 0

Getting Started with TemplateMark

TemplateMark is a data format from Accord Project that describes formatted natural language with embedded variables. In this article I introduce TemplateMark, the problems it solves and how to use it as an application developer.

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May 16, 2023 1