Contracts
Agreements and contracts
Clause templates, multilingual documents, and holding the evidence rather than the claim.
An agreement is the signed instrument. An engagement is the facts it gives rise to. A title change opens a new engagement, not a new contract; an amendment chains to the document it supersedes rather than editing it, because what somebody actually signed has to stay recoverable.
Templates are clauses, not uploaded files
A stored word-processor file cannot be merged reliably, diffed when a clause changes, or rendered in two languages side by side. Clause headings and bodies are held per language, so the two halves of a bilingual clause stay paired — clause 4.2 must be the same clause in both columns.
- A clause needs text in at least one of the template's languages, not all of them. A contract is written one language at a time, and refusing half-finished work would mean writing the whole thing twice before anything could be saved. Gaps are reported per clause and summarised at the top.
- Every language for a clause is edited together, side by side — editing one column in one place and the other somewhere else is precisely how the two drift, and the drift is invisible until a dispute turns on the governing-language version.
- Deleting a clause renumbers its position but never the printed number, which is the organisation's own text and may be cross-referenced elsewhere in the contract.
- A template that has produced a document is deactivated, not deleted — that link is how somebody answers which version of the standard terms a person signed.
- A new template starts empty. Clause text is the one part of this product where a plausible-looking default could do real legal harm, and a sample nobody reviewed is the one that gets sent.
Multilingual layouts
| Layout | What it does | When |
|---|---|---|
| Sequential | The whole document in one language, then the other. | The most common bilingual form |
| Side by side | Two columns. Refused for a third language. | Where a parallel reading is expected |
| Interleaved | Each clause in every language in turn. | The only one that scales past two |
A missing language is never filled in from another
Substituting the English where the Georgian should be produces a document that looks complete and is not — and with a governing-language clause, that is the version deciding a dispute. An unresolved merge field is likewise left visible as a placeholder: an obvious gap gets noticed, a silent blank where the salary should be gets signed.
Names on a contract
A person's name can be held per language, separately from the working form used in the interface, because a visa is refused when the name on the contract does not match the passport. Comparison ignores case, accents, word order and dropped particles.
Which engagement a contract belongs to
A contract names its own engagement, and its terms are filled from that one. For somebody holding two, the larger is not necessarily the one being contracted — a director's agreement must not be completed with a delivery manager's salary. Where an agreement predates any engagement, the earliest is used, because an offer letter is signed before anybody starts and quoting no salary is worse than quoting the offered one.