Clause Library within Draft & Flow

Outlaw's clause library ("CL") functionality is the first of its kind, enabling rapid, error-free reuse of approved legal language across multiple templates and documents, as well as dynamic linking of clauses which automatically keeps disparate templates and documents synchronized whenever the master is updated.

Most CLMs require a significant amount of work from legal departments in order to manually build a bank of approved language, and the bank itself then tends to get outdated quickly, because it is disconnected from the actual documents being used to create contracts.

On Outlaw, the templates and documents themselves are that bank of approved language, so all existing content is automatically usable in Outlaw's CL with zero additional work required. Moreover, the CL gets smarter and more robust automatically as customers continue to develop and update templates.

When a particular clause is "indexed" in the CL, that means it is available for lookup and reuse in other templates and within a generated document in Flow. All titled sections of templates are automatically indexed by default and can be looked up by their titles.

Untitled sections can also be manually included in the CL by specifying a lookup name. This is useful for scenarios such as salutations, where the language still needs to be standardized, but should not result in a title being inserted into the actual document.

Similarly, sections that are titled (and therefore indexed) can be manually excluded from the CL, so that they will not be reusable in other templates. This is useful for specialized cases where legal wants to ensure that that particular language is only ever used in that one template.

Entire templates can also be excluded from the CL in template settings, which again is useful to ensure more specialized focus and that language in specialized templates is never accidentally reused elsewhere.

Template exclusion can also be used to architect an explicit clause library on Outlaw that functions more manually, exactly like that of a traditional CLM. Customers can simply exclude all of their "real" templates from the CL, and then manually create one or more "library" templates which are not intended for actual contract creation, but instead include all standardized and reusable language. The "real" templates can then be updated to pull relevant clauses from the CL, ensuring that they will then continue to be synchronized and consistent in the event that language is updated in the master library templates.

Lookup

Whether customers build out their CL's automatically or explicitly as described above, even just a few templates' full of titled (or manually indexed) sections will result in a growing bank of clauses that can be reused across other templates.

Template authors can then lookup available clauses from the CL both inline typing a "/" within the Title of a new section, or in the persistent sidebar. (Note: lookup is only available for new sections without body content, in order to avoid accidentally overwriting existing language!)

In both cases, available clauses are first grouped by title, then once a titled clause is selected by pressing Return, users can cycle through different available options (if there are more than one) by pressing Tab, then Enter again to insert the selected clause into the template.

New sections inserted from the CL will initially show up as being "dynamically linked" to the source clause from which they came. This capability showcases the full power of Outlaw's CL – updating the source clause will automatically update all linked clauses (even across multiple templates) in real-time.

However, sometimes it is desirable to Save As... – meaning to use existing language from the CL as a starting point in another template, but then further tailor that language to the new template context. In these scenarios it is no longer desirable to dynamically update, so customers can click the link icon in the top right corner of a linked section in order to unlink it and enable editing.

In this event, this newly unlinked section will then automatically become available in the CL as well (unless excluded as described above), as an additional variant of that clause for future reuse.

The clause library can also be accessed while editing contracts in Flow. To do so, add a new section or subsection by clicking the vertical ellipsis to the right of an existing section. In the new section or subsection, enter “/“ to pull up the clause lookup. Type to search for the desired clause. Once you’ve located the desired clause, click Enter to view it, and click Enter again to add it to the contract. If you need to exist the Clause Library, just delete the slash (by hitting backspace) and you will return to a normal Title line.