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During the lifecycle of a contract, there will often be times when approval is required for the contract to continue its journey. LawVu lets you create approvals and attach them to most stages of a contract lifecycle.

We call these approval phases. Approval phases can be chained together to create approval workflows. Approval workflows are then applied to contracts or policies to control the progression of that contract or policy.

Approval workflows can also be created at a global level and saved as workflow templates.

Approval phases are the building blocks of approval workflows.

Each approval phase will have one or more people added to it, and each approval phase will have a rule whereby the phase can be marked as 'approved' by 'any' or 'all' of the people in that phase.

Approval phases are created inside an approval workflow and the approval workflow is what is applied to the contract.

Approval workflows are simply a collection of approval phases.

When a contract or policy encounters an approval workflow, it will pause the contract and then sequentially run through each approval phase in that approval workflow.

When all the approval workflow's approval phases have been completed, the contract will continue to the next stage in its lifecycle.

Below is a simple approval workflow consisting of 3 approval phases.

Approval workflows can be created globally (as workflow templates) or as required on individual contracts.

Rather than creating the approval workflows every single time you create a new contract - you can instead create 'Workflow templates'.

Workflow templates are created globally and can be assigned to various contract or policy types.

To create these you will go to
Settings / Contract Management / Approval workflows.

See this article for creating approval workflows from global workflow templates.