Beyond the traditional document formatting tools, Avvoka has a range of bespoke templating functions in order to automate the generation of legal contracts. The two basic functions are Placeholders and Conditions.

A) Placeholder Definition: A way of marking an input field in the document, indicating that an answer from the questionnaire will be inserted into the relevant location. In an ordinary legal document, this would normally be where square brackets would be located.

E.g: If you wish to populate the name of the borrower into the document, you might use the placeholder “Borrower Name”

B) Placeholder icon:

C) Inserting a Placeholder:

For instance, let us take the beginnings of a Employment Contract

If you highlight the text “Employer Name” and press the Placeholder function, it creates a corresponding question in the “Questionnaire”:

Now, when a customer or a colleague answers this question it will populate the document, so that in this case the answer “Avvoka” will lead to “Avvoka” appearing as the legal name of the company in the Employment Contract:

If you want to repeat a placeholder, you have to make sure you name it exactly the same as the first placeholder you created (this is case sensitive, so “Attribute name” will be different to “attribute name” or “Attribute Name”), you should not include blank spaces after the placeholder (for example, “Attribute name “). Another simple way to repeat placeholders is just to copy and paste them. If the placeholders are the same they will have only one related question in the questionnaire.

2) PLACEHOLDERS IN MORE DETAIL:

As outlined in the definition at the start of this article, Placeholders are used to denote input fields in the Template. They provide an anchor point for answers in the questionnaire to be outputted into. As outlined before, to create a Placeholder, simply select the text with the cursor that you wish to become an input field and then click the Placeholder icon in the toolbar.

We recommend that you label the Placeholder in a recognisable manner; for instance, if you wish a company name to be outputted into the document, you might call the Placeholder “Company Name”. If you use that Placeholder in other locations in the Template, the company name output will be dropped in at those specified (duplicate) locations in the document. For this to work correctly, it is essential that the Placeholders are identical.

When you create a new Placeholder, a corresponding questionnaire item will automatically be included in the “Questionnaire” tab, accessible from the left-hand bar. More information on creating the questionnaire can be found here.

The Placeholder function also allows users to format the answers which will output into the document. You can either adjust this when selecting an existing placeholder or when creating a new placeholder on the right-hand side under ‘Transform value’.

Were you to choose the “Upper Text” option, the output text for the relevant placeholder which will appear in the document in uppercase. The same principle applies to the “Lower Text” and “Capitalise Text” options.

3) COMBINING PLACEHOLDERS AND CONDITIONS:

Placeholders and Conditionality functions can be used in tandem. In this way, users will be able to layer additional input fields into conditions, thus creating more sophisticated templates to meet contracting needs.

In the image below you can see how there is a Block Condition (wrapped in light green) containing a Placeholder (text highlighted in yellow). Check the conditions article to know more about this.

Below you can watch a video that shows you how to add a placeholder (among other things):