Forms

When business teams need a contract, the request often comes as an email or Slack message: “We need an NDA with Acme Corp.” Legal follows up with questions. What type of NDA? Mutual or one-way? What’s the governing law? Who’s the signing authority? Each back-and-forth adds a day to the turnaround.

Forms replace that back-and-forth with a structured questionnaire. A requester fills out the form with all the information legal needs, clicks submit, and Pactly can automatically generate the contract with those answers already populated. No follow-up emails, no missing details, no manual data entry into the document.

• Creating a Form - Build a new form, add fields, organize into sections, and preview
• Field Types Reference - Every field type and its configuration options
• Conditional Logic - Show or hide fields and actions based on form answers
• Form Actions - Configure what happens on submission: contract generation, import, redirect
• Field Mappings and Naming - Connect form answers to contract properties and auto-generate names
• Sharing and Access - Distribute forms via links, manage access keys, and track submissions
• Form Sequences - Chain multiple forms into multi-step workflows

Forms sit at the very beginning of the contract lifecycle, before a contract exists. They handle the intake stage by collecting the information needed to create the right contract, then triggering the appropriate action.

A simple example: your organization has a standard NDA template. Instead of asking legal to manually fill in the party name, effective date, and governing law each time, you create a form. A business team member fills it out, clicks submit, and Pactly generates the NDA with all the details already populated.

Forms can also handle complex routing. A single form can generate different types of contracts depending on how the user answers. If someone selects “Mutual NDA,” one template is used. If they select “One-way NDA,” a different template is used. This branching is controlled through form actions and their conditions.

While intake is the most common use, forms serve several other roles in the contract lifecycle:

Confirmations and acknowledgments. For contracts with elevated risk (counterparty risk, financial exposure, regulatory concerns), forms can capture explicit acknowledgment from the requesting team. A confirmation form presents the key risks and requires the requester to formally confirm they understand and accept them before the contract proceeds.

Agreement summaries. Forms can present a structured summary of a contract’s key terms to approvers, making it easier for them to review and approve without reading the full document. The form pre-populates with contract properties, so the summary is generated automatically.

Collecting information from external parties. Forms do not require a Pactly account. Anyone with a form link can fill one out, making forms useful for collecting information from vendors, partners, or other teams who are not onboarded to the platform.

Pre-populating later-stage forms. In form sequences, earlier forms can set contract properties that are then pulled into later forms via reverse mappings. This means information collected at intake flows through to confirmation or summary forms without anyone re-entering it.

Click a concept to learn more 5 concepts

Fields Sections Actions Conditions Mappings

Individual questions on a form. Pactly supports 14 field types: text, number, date, dropdown, checkbox, file upload, party selector, signature, and more. Each field captures a specific piece of information and can be marked as required, given help text, or made conditional on other answers.

Fields are organized into sections (groups) within a form. Sections break a long form into manageable parts with a sidebar for navigation. Each section can optionally be submitted independently, which is useful for multi-stage approval workflows.

What happens when the form is submitted. A form can generate a contract from a template, create a contract for review, import an external contract, generate an attachment, or redirect to another form. Each action can have conditions that control when it fires.

Rules that control visibility and behavior. Field conditions show or hide questions based on previous answers. Action conditions determine which submission action fires based on the form responses. Both use the same AND/OR logic builder. Conditions can range from a single rule to hundreds of rules for complex routing.

Connections between form fields and contract properties. When a requester enters a value in a form field, that value can automatically populate a contract property on the generated contract. These properties serve as both template variables (filling blanks in the generated document) and metadata on the contract record (used for filtering, reporting, and workflows).

Forms handle the earliest stage: the request. Before a contract exists in Pactly, someone needs to provide enough information to create one. Forms replace the back-and-forth of emails and chat messages with a single, structured submission.

Once submitted, the configured action takes over. The most common path is automatic contract generation, where a template is populated with the form’s field values and a new contract enters the repository in Draft status. From there, the contract moves through the standard lifecycle of review, negotiation, approval, and execution.

Forms and templates are tightly connected through contract properties. Template variables and value maps are linked to properties, and form field mappings also link to properties. Properties are the bridge: a form field sets a property value, and that property value fills the corresponding template variable in the generated document.

A single form can generate different contracts by having multiple form actions, each linked to a different template with its own conditions. This means one intake form can serve an entire category of agreements.

• Filling Out a Form
• Creating a Form
• Contracts Overview