In the following sentence, the order amount and the delivery date are placeholders, highlighted in cyan.

When you then create two questions corresponding to those placeholders, ClauseBuddy will automatically replace the cyan words with placeholders. When you click on the blue placeholder at the right, you will automatically select the corresponding question at the left.

When the answer to the question is filled, the placeholders will instead be replaced by the relevant value:

This seems simple as a start, but there several other possibilities you need to be aware of.

First, it is possible to put the placeholder within a conditional body. For example:

It is also possible to put the placeholder among mere body text, but you then need to be careful to prefix the answer with an @, otherwise it will not be recognised by ClauseBuddy.

When you use the answer inside the condition itself (i.e., before the colon), then no placeholder will be shown.

The reason is that, within a condition, you often deliberately want to check whether a certain question is answered or not, and then show different answers depending on the situation. For example:

You can "chain" multiple conditions by inserting the vertical pipe symbol. For example, instead of writing:

You can also write the following, which more clearly expresses the author's intent that one of several options will need to be chosen. Lawvu Draft will then insert the first text for which the associated condition is met:

If each of the conditions has a structure similar "x = y", you can also write this more concisely:

Another advantage of using the pipe operator is that you can easily insert a final "catch all" part — using else: — which will apply when none of the previous conditions was met.

Show the name, address, city and country. Require each value to be filled in, otherwise a placeholder will be shown:

Alternatively, you can also highlight the entire line (instead of having separate highlights) and use @-prefixes:

Note that you must use @-prefixes, otherwise the "name", "address", "city" and "country" would be shown as-is, i.e. as literal text instead of having their answers filled in (or placeholders being shown).

Suppose the country is optional, because for example most of the companies will be situated in France by default. Accordingly, you want to show France when the country is not filled in:

This makes use of the { if : ... | else: ... } structure for conditions.

Suppose you want to only show the country when it's filled in (not replace it by some default value such as France), and not show a placeholder when the country is missing:

The @country:, @country could also have been wrapped in curly braces.

Suppose you want to show all the effectively filled in parts of an address, separated by spaces, and don't want to show placeholders:

If you want to separate them by comma's:

The @enumerate special function takes any number of parameters, and puts comma's in between the values that are filled in. If some answer is not folled in (as is the case with the city in the screenshot), it is simply skipped.

If you want to automatically use "and" before the penultimate item:

If you want to show a warning towards the end-user when the city would be missing:

The @cascade special function will use the first parameter that is not undefined. In the screenshot, the answer for city is missing, so the highlight special-function will instead be used.

If you want to show the name of the entity in uppercase, but invite the user to click on the name box when it's missing:

The @if special function has three parameters: the first parameter is the condition (in this case: "is the name filled in?"), the second parameter is what should be used when the condition is met, the third parameter is what shoud be used when the condition is not met.

Alternatively, you can also use an "if this - then that - else" structure between curly braces. Note that the @name does not need to be put inside a @placeholder, because the part after the else: is considered body text.

If you want to show the name of the entity in uppercase when it's filled in, and otherwise the text "MISSING NAME":

Each question should always have an identifier, as this identifier links the question to the placeholder in the document.

The identifier should match the text highlighted in cyan in the document, or the text preceded by “@” when the placeholder is inserted directly in the text.

For example, if the placeholder is amount, the question should use the identifier “amount” so that ClauseBuddy can automatically insert the user’s answer in the correct place.

When you insert predefined answers (discussed above), you can check this option to also allow the end-user to insert a custom, non-predefined answer. This option is not shown for yes/no questions.

Mandatory questions are marked with a red dot next to the question title. If one or more mandatory questions remain unanswered, a red warning message will appear showing which questions still need to be completed.

Text-based questions can be configured to allow multiple answers.This lets users select more than one predefined option (shown as square checkboxes instead of round buttons). If “Free answers” is enabled, users can also add their own answers. When linked to a placeholder, all selected answers will be inserted together.

By default, the answers for text questions need to be inputted in a single-line box. When this setting is enabled, a large multi-line area box will be used instead.

An answer hint shows example text inside the answer box before the user types anything. This helps guide users on how to format their answer.

Help text provides extra explanations or warnings. It appears when the user hovers over the question mark icon, making it less intrusive than comments or warnings.

Special tags are an advanced topic. They allow you to integrate Lawvu Draft templates with third party services, such as external contract archives.

You can mark one or more predefined answers as default, meaning they are preselected when the document starts.

Multiple defaults are useful when:

How conditions work

Shared conditions
Shared conditions can be created in the Conditions menu and reused across the template. This avoids repeating complex logic and makes updates easier, since changes only need to be made in one place.

Shared conditions can be configured through the "Conditions" menu item at the top of the template editor.

Conditions are always configured in a similar way — whether you are dealing with a shared condition or the condition of a card, question or predefined answer. Essentially, you select the relevant item (card, question, predefined answer or shared item) and then configure the condition at the right side of the screen.

When you click on the green + Condition button, you get a dropdown menu from which you can choose one of the following condition types:

Each condition can host any number of sub-conditions, which can on their turn refer to their own sub-sub-conditions — any level deep.

Conditions can be copied and pasted between cards, questions, or answers to save time.

When you share a template or document, you generate a unique hyperlink that will lead to your template, or to a specific document (e.g. https://app.clausebase.com/ml/qfVnNApNnjdR7v2C).

You can then send or publish this hyperlink any way you want — e.g., send it by email to a client, send it to your family members through WhatsApp, publish it on your intranet towards colleagues, or even publish it on your website. Other users can simply click on it (or copy/paste it in their browser) and fill out the template or change the document you shared; no separate username or password is required.

The downside of this anonymous approach is, of course, that once you share, you have no control over where the hyperlink will ultimately end up.

While you can somewhat mitigate this risk by setting an expiry date, it is probably not a good idea to share sensitive templates in this way. (A better alternative is to create named accounts with a separate security code for such sensitive material.)

You can initiate the sharing by either going to Settings > Share ...

... or by visiting the Templates Overview panel and clicking on an existing template and going to the Share submenu item:

This setting allows you to specify whether the recipient is allowed to export to PDF and/or to a DOCX file.

You may, for example, deliberately disallow exporting a template to DOCX when you want to avoid that the sharing-link's recipient would be able to alter the resulting document in Microsoft Word.

Sharing-links are anonymous and can be used by anyone, so you can never be sure whether a recipient of your link will on his/her turn send the link to someone else. It is therefore probably a good idea to set an expiry date on your link. The default setting is an expiry date of one month.

Lawvu Draft tracks the usage of your sharing-links. The usage reports (available at request) will show you the internal note you specified (e.g., "NDA for accounting department" vs. a different link with "NDA for sales"), so you can figure out who used your sharing-links.

When multiple anonymous accounts exist in your customer account, you can specify which account should be used for the sharing-link you are about to create.

For most Lawvu Draft users, this setting can be ignored (most will probably not have multiple anonymous accounts anyway, so the setting would not even be shown). However, it does allow for interesting scenarios for advanced users, as they can for example create accounts with different settings (language, access rights, different connections to third party services, etc.).