Custom styling

Why?

Simple clause libraries only allow you to store plain blocks of text, and require you to manually apply styling once text is pasted into a document. ClauseBuddy allows you to easily store clauses together with their internal structure — title, headings, subheadings and bullets — and can ensure that such internal structure is respected when clauses are pasted into an MS Word document.

ClauseBuddy incorporates "layout-awareness", which means that ClauseBuddy will do a lot of complex calculations under-the-hood to figure out the styling of your currently opened Word-document, and tries to make your clause fit in there, without you having to do anything.

About 80% of the time this automatic styling works correctly and there is no need for custom styling. In other words, you can probably skip this entire section about custom styling.

However, many legal documents have mediocre to even very poor technical layout quality, so ClauseBuddy is facing an impossible task and may fail. Furthermore, it may be the case that you have very special inhouse layouts or templates, for which you want to provide better layout guidance.

For these situations, you can configure custom styles in ClauseBuddy, that will take precedence over the automatically calculated styling. Once your house style is properly implemented, (almost) perfect layout results are guaranteed when you paste clauses into documents conforming to that house style.

Warning: expert territory

Implementing this custom style / house style in ClauseBuddy is, on itself, not difficult, but requires a deep understanding of how styles and templates really work in MS Word. In our experience, few lawyers really master this area, and tend to simply use whatever styling happens to be available in a template.

In other words, don't be afraid to involve your organisation's (internal or external) MS Word expert to implement your house style in ClauseBuddy. We also offer online Word courses and support on a consultancy basis, please check our support options.

Methodology

Your house style is implemented by manually mapping every layout option in ClauseBuddy to your house style's layout structure (further called a "style scheme"). You can even store multiple style schemes, e.g. one for contracts, a separate one for legal briefs and yet another one for formal letters.

Optionally, you can also offer the software identification clues for your style schemes, so that the right one will be pre-selected when the user opens ClauseBuddy from within such a template.

All users of your organisation will automatically receive a copy of your style schemes (as well as any updates to it) when they load ClauseBuddy with an account linked to your organisation. These style schemes are then stored locally within MS Word's configuration and are automatically applied when there is a match between the currently opened document and some loaded style scheme.

Note: the "Clause9" style scheme is automatically loaded by the system without users having to configure anything. It applies to documents created with Clause9.

Where to find it in the software

See Settings > Styles. Note that only administrators can configure custom styles.

Once configured, the house style will be automatically applied when there's a match with a template through the template detection. Also clauses inserted through Truffle Hunt will make use of the house style in such situation.