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Templates

Every time someone drafts a contract from scratch, they risk using outdated language, missing required clauses, or formatting inconsistently. When your organization has hundreds of agreements to produce, you need a way to standardize the starting point while still allowing customization for each deal.

Pactly templates solve this by giving you a single, maintained source document for each agreement type. Instead of copying and editing old contracts, users generate new ones from a template that always reflects your current approved language, with the right variables and logic built in.

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Template list in Pactly showing template names, categories (NDA, Service Agreement, Employment), version numbers, and last-modified dates

What’s Covered in This Section

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This section will cover everything you need to create and manage templates in Pactly. The following articles are planned:

  • Creating a Template (coming soon) - How to upload a Word document and configure it as a Pactly template
  • Template Variables (coming soon) - Defining placeholders that get replaced with actual values during contract generation
  • Conditional Logic (coming soon) - Controlling which clauses and content appear based on deal terms
  • Managing Templates (coming soon) - Updating, versioning, and organizing your template library

What Templates Do

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A template is a Word document (.docx) with placeholders, called variables, that Pactly fills in when generating a contract. When a user creates a new contract from a template, Pactly processes the document and:

  1. Replaces variables with actual values, such as party names, dates, monetary amounts, and other deal terms.
  2. Evaluates conditional logic to determine which clauses should appear in the final document. For example, a liability cap clause might only be included when the deal value exceeds a certain threshold.
  3. Applies value maps to translate selections into the correct document text. For example, a currency code selection of “USD” becomes ”$” in the generated contract.

The result is a consistently formatted, correctly worded contract that enters the repository in Draft status, ready for review and negotiation.

🎨 Illustration
Creative/conceptual: Left side shows a template document with highlighted variable placeholders ({party_name}, {effective_date}, {contract_value}). Right side shows the generated contract with those placeholders filled in with real values (Acme Corp, March 15 2026, $120,000). An arrow connects them.

Key Concepts

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Variables

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Variables are placeholders in the template document that get replaced with actual values during contract generation. A variable might represent a party name, a date, a monetary amount, a jurisdiction, or any other deal-specific term. Variables can accept different data types: text, numbers, dates, and lists.

Clauses

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Clauses are pre-written text segments within a template that can be conditionally included or excluded from the final document. A single template might contain clauses for different liability terms, indemnification language, or governing law provisions, with conditions controlling which ones appear in any given contract.

Conditions

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Conditions are logic rules that control which content appears in the generated document. They evaluate the values provided during contract creation and determine the output. For example, a condition might specify: “if deal value exceeds $100,000, include the liability cap clause” or “if the counterparty is based in the EU, include GDPR provisions.”

Value Maps

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Value maps are lookup tables that translate form selections into document text. They bridge the gap between what a user selects in a form and what appears in the contract. For example, a user might select “USD” from a currency dropdown, and the value map translates that into ”$” wherever the currency symbol variable appears in the template.

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Creative/conceptual: Four concept cards - Variables (tag icon with {party_name}), Clauses (document sections with toggle on/off), Conditions (if/then logic tree), Value Maps (translation table USD→$)

How Templates Fit the Contract Lifecycle

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Templates handle the creation stage of the contract lifecycle. When a user requests a new contract, often through a form, the template provides the starting document. The generated contract enters the repository in Draft status, where it can be reviewed, negotiated, and eventually executed.

Templates sit between intake (forms) and review (playbooks). Forms collect the data, templates generate the document, and playbooks guide the review of incoming counterparty agreements. For contracts generated from your own templates, the review process typically involves internal approval rather than playbook-based review.

📐 Diagram
Horizontal flow: Form submission → Template processing (variables replaced, conditions evaluated, value maps applied) → Draft contract in repository. Show the three processing steps as distinct stages.

Connection to Forms

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Forms often collect the data that fills template variables. When a user submits a form, Pactly can automatically generate a contract from the linked template using the form responses as variable values. This means the person requesting the contract does not need to know anything about the template structure. They fill out a form, and a correctly formatted contract appears in the repository.

Forms are covered in their own section. See Forms Overview (coming soon) for details on building intake forms and connecting them to templates.

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