Overview
As a Microsoft Word App, Contract Express Author integrates into the Microsoft Word ribbon, providing a familiar user experience for users creating templates in all Contract Express products. The add-in provides the ease and speed of automating complex legal documents without the complexity inherent in traditional document assembly tools. Further, generated documents automatically inherit their styling from the marked-up Word document without having to apply styles to each generated document.
Contract Express Author is designed for lawyers. While other contract creation and document assembly systems require templates to be created in a complex, proprietary, or xml based computer language, Contract Express Author employs an easy to use, lawyer-developed, legal mark-up notation which has the effect of turning static Word legal forms directly into dynamic web-based questionnaires.
If Contract Express brings in one more deal or saves one deal from going badly, then the whole system has paid for itself, and we do hundreds of deals a year, so that is the value proposition. Read case study >
Seth Weissman
Features
Plain language mark-up with auto scan as you type
Contract Express Author’s intelligent auto scan is continuously analyzing your Word document in the background to pick out Contract Express mark-up instantly, enabling users to automatically create new variables as they type.
Try automating your own template with our free trial.
Clause libraries
Contract Express Author supports the creation of super templates from a library of clauses or sub-templates. Common clauses and terms can be shared across templates to enable authors to update standard language once, and have those updates applied instantly to all templates that use that clause.
Complex repetitions
Information about collections of data such as multiple parties can be collected and formatted using a repeat business rule. Repeat mark-up can be nested to any level, and repeated data can be used to generate multiple instances of documents, varying by repeated information such as party names.
Localization
Contract Express Author supports the creation of super templates from a library of clauses or sub-templates. Common clauses and terms can be shared across templates to enable authors to update standard language once, and have those updates applied instantly to all templates that use that clause.
Computations
From Possessive to DatesBetween, Contract Express supports over 220 functions.
Mark-up in headers, footers, endnotes, and headnotes
Contract Express Author supports field and span mark-up in these non-body areas of a Microsoft Word document.
Full unicode support
Contract Express fully supports Unicode for all aspects of the system – questionnaire, generated documents, input and output data, dynamically accessed data from external databases and SharePoint lists.
Questionnaire Editor
The Questionnaire Editor enables template authors to create and organize the questionnaire interview pages. Users can move questions between pages, perform relevancy analysis and edit attributes of the questions as the end user will see them.
Auto arrange questionnaire
The Questionnaire Editor supports an auto arrange feature which will create pages and assign variables to those pages based upon a ranking algorithm which takes into account the position of the question in the document and it’s dependency upon other questions.
Task Pane provides real-time troubleshooting
Contract Express Author’s rules engine assists in troubleshooting your logic expressions and question ordering on the questionnaire. If Contract Express determines that you are asking a question prior to a variable it depends on, Contract Express Author will report this in the task pane when you attempt to upload the template.
Integrated with Microsoft Word
As a Microsoft Word App, Contract Express Author integrates into the Microsoft Word ribbon, providing a familiar user experience for users creating templates. Further, generated documents automatically inherit their styling from the marked-up Word document without having to apply styles to each generated document.
Patented multi-targeted cross references
Contract Express’s patented cross-reference mark-up enables authors to specify a cross reference to multiple optional targets in the document, and between documents if used with the Include option. Word does not allow this. At document generation time, Contract Express replaces the cross reference with a standard Word cross reference, and optionally updates the cross reference before the document is opened.
Sophisticated template versioning
Contract Express Author supports a sophisticated template versioning system for both templates and sub templates which make up a template hierarchy
Alerts editor
Alerts on the questionnaire enable the legal author to communicate with users to warn them of options not usually taken together, or even to stop users producing documents under specific circumstances. These alerts are in addition to simple validation alerts such date ranges, text length and text masks.
External dictionairies
Information about collections of data such as multiple parties can be collected and formatted using a repeat business rule. Repeat mark-up can be nested to any level, and repeated data can be used to generate multiple instances of documents, varying by repeated information such as party names.