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 handle the very first stage of the contract lifecycle: the request. Before a contract exists in Pactly, someone needs to provide enough information to create the right one.

Once a form is submitted, the configured action takes over. The most common path is automatic contract generation: a template is populated with the form’s answers and a new contract enters the repository in Draft status, ready for review, negotiation, approval, and signature.

Intake is the most common use, but the same building blocks serve several roles across the lifecycle.

Because earlier forms can pass values into later ones (through form sequences), information collected at intake can flow through to a confirmation or summary form without anyone re-entering it.

A single form does not have to lead to a single result. By giving the form multiple actions, each with its own conditions, one intake form can route to different outcomes based on the requester’s answers. It can even switch from generating your own template to uploading the counterparty’s document for playbook review when they insist on their own paper.

When a form generates a contract, the requester’s answers need to land in the right places in the document. Contract properties are the bridge that makes this work: a form field fills a property, and that property fills the matching blank in the template. The same property also becomes searchable, filterable data on the contract record.

You set this up once when you build the form and template, so you don’t think about it day to day. For the detail on linking fields to properties and properties to template variables, see Field Mappings and Naming.

Five building blocks make up every form. You’ll see them again in the articles that follow.

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