What is conditional logic? How to create dynamic contract templates

Conditional logic is a mechanism used to set rules and conditions that streamline and simplify otherwise complex processes, like drafting and agreeing contracts, for example. Since the term originates from programming language, it all sounds very technical - but fear not, we've simplified it for you in this deep dive 😁.

Conditional logic can be applied to contracts in Juro with ease to help automate clauses, fallback positions and more. If you're keen to automate your contract playbook using conditional logic, to see it in action. Otherwise you can find out everything you need to know about conditional logic in this Juro explainer.

What is conditional logic?

Conditional logic is a concept that involves setting rules and conditions that alter a process based on the information a user provides or selects. At a basic level, this will usually mean that if a condition is met, then a specific action will be performed, and conditional statements often look something like this: “If X happens, then do Y”.

The concept is widely known in computer programming and business as an effective way to streamline lengthy processes and reduce the amount of administrative work involved in certain tasks like filling in forms.

However, it is also commonly used within digital contracts to make contract drafting more efficient and enable business teams to self-serve on legal agreements. This is because, using a contract automation software like Juro, conditional logic can reduce risks associated with self-serve contracts by automating certain rules and clauses within a contract to suit specific use cases and situations.

For example, if a user selects a certain response in a digital form, conditional logic will trigger specific text fields to be either hidden or shown accordingly. This enables the form to respond better to a user’s specific needs and it can usually be achieved using predefined rules and smart fields.

In contracts, this information would otherwise be requested from legal on a regular basis, which wastes a lot of their valuable time.

Although it sounds complex, we come across conditional logic frequently in our daily lives. For example, if a form has a question with the responses ‘yes’, ‘no’ and ‘other’, and you select ‘other’, then a new box might appear in the form asking for an explanation as to what you mean. However, if you selected ‘yes’ or ‘no’, this additional box would remain hidden.

Prior to online contracts and digital forms, businesses would try to give customers the paperwork that was most relevant to them. However, digital forms that use conditional logic can achieve this result with much greater accuracy, and conditional logic can be used to improve the experience users have when filling out documents.

Common use cases of conditional logic

Conditional logic has been adopted in businesses across a wide range of industries, as it allows them to move towards an intelligently designed workflow and depart from a tiresome manual one. Some of the most common instances where conditional logic is used to simplify business processes include in:

Business contracts

Setting up conditional logic for business contracts can be a hugely effective way to make the contract drafting process more efficient and ensure that a counterparty has a positive experience when dealing with one of your contracts.

Not only can applying conditional logic to business contracts ensure more accurate drafting, but it can also reduce the time spent reviewing and writing a contract significantly. In legal agreements, conditional logic is often used to hide or display additional terms in a contract, depending on what a counterparty has agreed in a Q&A process.

Satisfaction surveys

Satisfaction surveys are a perfect opportunity to acquire feedback from recipients about a product or service, and conditional logic helps businesses collect the right information by displaying text boxes for additional information where useful. For example, if a customer ticks a box saying they were ‘disappointed’ with a product, conditional logic might trigger a text box below that asks for an explanation as to why this was.

Enquiry forms

When enquiring for a service, customers will be keen to enquire as quickly as possible and will expect to receive a tailored response. Like with satisfaction surveys, conditional logic empowers users to request more detail from users based on their responses. For example, if a user ticks a box saying that they’d like to receive a customized quote for a certain job, they may then be presented with additional questions relating to the size of the job.

Job application forms

Conditional logic is commonplace in job application forms too and is usually designed to add or remove questions and text boxes based on an applicant’s responses.

One of the most typical examples of this in practice is if an application form asks an individual if they are a citizen of the country they’re applying for a role in. If they select yes, they can proceed through the form. However, if they select no, they may be required to provide further information about their immigration status in an additional field that appears.

What are the benefits of using conditional logic to automate your contract playbook?

1. Reduces form length ✂️

One of the most obvious benefits of using conditional logic in your forms is that it reduces the length of your form and makes it more succinct. This is achieved by cutting out any irrelevant options, sections and fields and only including the required ones.

2. Makes forms more personalized 💗

Since conditional logic causes a form to adapt based on user responses, these forms become more personalized as a result. For example, conditional logic can be used to display custom messages within a form, and this can deliver a more unique and customizable experience for end users.

This is beneficial since it prevents counterparties and customers from feeling like the interaction they've had is only a generic one, and this could be what differentiates your business from others in the uniform world of dull and uniform documents. In fact, Statista revealed that 90% of U.S consumers find personalized marketing to be appealing, so it’s clear that users prefer content designed with them in mind.

3. Improves user experience 🌟

Filling out forms is renowned for being a chore. Lengthy and unintuitive design only exacerbates this feeling, resulting in a negative user experience. However, by removing unnecessary fields and streamlining the process to make it cleaner and more interactive, conditional logic can dramatically improve the experience users have when completing forms, documents and legal agreements.

Since forms and contracts are typically among the first interactions an individual or counterparty has with your business, it’s critical to make these experiences as positive and smooth as possible. Eliminating any confusion and poor design through conditional logic achieves just that.

4. Improves the quality of data collected 📊

Forms that use conditional logic are able to remove and hide irrelevant sections and fields according to user responses, which reduces the need to collect redundant data from individuals.

One of the biggest advantages of this is that you can also ensure that the data you do collect is worthwhile and fit for purpose. When users are forced to add answers to questions that don’t apply to them, it can result in inaccuracy, which weakens the quality of the data you collect.

Conditional logic empowers you to ask users more specific and tailored questions, meaning that the responses received are more likely to be comprehensive and correct.

6. Speeds up turnaround time ⏰

The shorter and more straightforward your forms are, the faster they’ll get completed. By streamlining forms to speed up the process, legal teams can get contracts across the line faster and sales teams can capture revenue more swiftly.

7. Reduces errors 🗑️

By automatically excluding fields and sections that are irrelevant to the customer or counterparty, you’ll be able to reduce any errors that occur in critical documents like legal agreements. This is because irrelevant fields can confuse users and result in expensive mistakes, and eliminating them reduces this possibility.

Why is conditional logic useful in contracts?

As we’ve just discussed, there are plenty of general benefits of using conditional logic, particularly with regards to creating a more positive and intuitive user experience.  However, the benefits of conditional logic go even deeper when you look specifically at how they can be used to supercharge a contract workflow with Juro.

By setting rules and conditions in your contract workflow, you can bake fallback positions into your templates, and set up instances where additional clauses will be automatically inserted into the contract body.

This allows you to capture the most value possible from your legal agreements, and provides the solid foundations needed to enable business teams to self-serve at different stages within the contract workflow.

With these conditions and fallback positions in place, sales representatives are empowered to negotiate agreements with minimal input from the legal team.

For example, if you’re willing to soften clauses for deals above a certain value, like an indemnity clause, then you can create this as hidden ‘logic’ in Juro. When creating a new contract, the template will then choose the correct terms depending on the value of the deal.

In this example, the relevant jurisdiction is conditional, and will be selected based on the contract data inputted.

Conditional logic can also mitigate risk throughout the contract process, since it reduces the need for end-users to draft aspects of the contract themselves. Instead, they can simply pick from a menu of options that have been approved and written by lawyers. This is best practice for contract management since it enables commercial teams to self-serve confidently on contract creation.

In short: setting up conditional logic in your contracts can reduce risk, improve efficiency and empower your business teams to self-serve on legal agreements. But how can you go about setting it up, if you haven’t already?

How to apply conditional logic to contracts in Juro

Applying conditional logic to your contracts is made simple with Juro. Juro’s conditional logic feature enables users to apply conditions and rules to any part of a legal agreement to make it smarter and more intuitive.

Put simply, using conditional logic within your contracts means setting up rules on the contract based on the outcome of the values in your smartifelds. Each condition is tied to a ‘choice’ smart field value, and these smart field values determine whether certain sections of the contract or template either show or become hidden, much like most conditional logic features. Here’s how you can set this up in our contract automation tool:

How to set up conditions in Juro

Setting up conditions in Juro enables you to use our natural language Q&A function to update the text contained within your contract. This can be done for both templates and one-off contracts.

To find out how to set up conditions in Juro, watch the video below or continue reading👇.

Watch Juro's legal engineer, Jeremy, explain how to set up smartfields and conditions.

In order to set up conditions in your contract, follow these steps:

1. Firstly, open up the conditions tool, which can be found by pressing on the three dots in the right hand corner of your contract in Juro.

1. Select ‘Add condition’, which will then open up a new condition within your toolbar.
2. By default, the condition will be named ‘Condition X’, but you can rename it by simply clicking on the name and typing a new one in.
3. Link to the relevant smartfield, set the value of the smartfield that will act as the trigger, and set the action that will be performed once triggered.
4. You can then add a condition using this sidebar to a specific part of the contract by dragging and dropping the condition. Alternatively, you can highlight the text in your contract that you want to add the condition to and select the relevant condition from the drop-down menu in the toolbar.

5. Once you’ve done this for each of your conditions, the contract text will automatically update with the smartfield choices selected at the Q&A stage. You will also be able to access the conditions in the contract editor, too.

Supercharge your contracts with Juro

Want to supercharge your contracts with conditional logic? Get Juro. Juro is an all-in-one contract automation platform that helps visionary legal counsel and the teams they enable to agree and manage contracts in one unified workspace. To find out more, hit the button below to get in touch.