Upgrading from Lextree for Contract Management

Upgrading to the New Lextree

This guide is for people moving from the legacy version of Lextree for Contract Management to the new Lextree. It is not a tutorial on every new feature. It shows where things are in the version you know and where they are in the new product, so you can find what you are used to seeing.

All of your data has been migrated to the new version.

Where your information lives now

Use this table as a quick reference. Each row is explained in more detail below.

Before you start

Lextree has many more modules

The new Lextree is much broader than the contract management product you use today. It has 21 modules, and all of them are included in your subscription. This guide focuses on the two that cover contract management:

• Contracts, the home of everything from the legacy product.
• Counterparties, a new module for vendor and supplier management alongside your contracts.

You may see other modules too. Some were the natural home for data you managed in Lextree for Contract Management, so it was migrated there. Or your organization may have decided to turn them on. Common examples:

• Certifications.
• Grants, if you give or receive grants.
• Insurance, for insurance policies and certificates of insurance.
• Licenses and Permits.
• Employment, for employment agreements.
• Treasury, which has a section for credit facilities and loans.

If you don’t see any of these, that’s fine. Everything they track can also be tracked in the Contracts module. Lextree follows a simple principle: there is a straightforward way to do everything, and a more complete way when you need it. See Turning on other modules below.

Your screens may look different

Lextree is now highly customizable. The columns on each list, the sections on each detail page, and the labels and order of fields may differ from what you see in the video. That only means your version has been tailored to your needs, either by your administrator or as part of the migration. The examples use demo data.

The dashboard

The legacy dashboard showed contracts expiring soon, alerts and tasks. The new dashboard shows:

• Needs attention, the things coming up. Upcoming events are drawn from a much wider set of dates than legacy alerts. Change the time range, select an event to jump to it, or open it in the calendar.
• A link to the full compliance calendar, which is more comprehensive than the legacy alerts calendar.
• Watching, the workflows you are involved in.
• Recently updated records you work with.
• Favorites. Favorite a contract or counterparty you are working on, and it appears here so you can get to it quickly.
• Modules, the modules turned on for you. Which ones you see depends on your organization’s settings.

The contract registry

The legacy main contracts page listed all your contracts with your custom fields, let you choose what was displayed and filter it, and had Add and Request buttons. The new Registry lists every contract you have access to and works the same way, with more capability:

• Pin columns. Drag a column, such as the contract name, into the pinned area to keep it in place while you scroll. Drag it back out to unpin it.
• Sort on any column.
• Search any column and combine filters to find what you need. Clear them at any time.
• Save a display. Saved displays are personal to you, so the list looks the way you want each time you come back.

Every list page in Lextree works this way.

New adds a contract, just like Add in the legacy product.

Request starts a workflow to request a contract, as it does today. You choose from a list of available workflows. Lextree ships with several standard workflows, and your administrator may modify them or add your own.

The contract detail page

Select a contract in the registry to open its detail page.

The legacy detail page showed summary data, then tabs for Documents, Requirements, Alerts and Tasks. The new page has the same idea with some important differences.

The summary data is at the top, grouped into sections such as Agreement, Term and Governing Terms. There is more detail than in the legacy version, and it is structured. Your administrators control everything about these sections: whether there are any, how many, their names, and what goes in each. Select Edit to change the contract, or favorite it to add it to your dashboard.

Below the summary are collections of related records, and on the right are the Calendar, Attachments and Workflows panels that appear on every record.

Parties

Parties is new, but it captures familiar information. In the legacy product, a multi-party agreement listed more than one party, and your own subsidiaries and operating divisions were usually named in the Entities field.

In the new Lextree, both live in Parties. A contract lists the counterparty, the party outside your organization, alongside any of your own organizations that participate. Each party has its own details, which can be customized. Select New to add a party.

Documents

Documents keep the same structure as the legacy version. The contract is the umbrella for the legal relationship between you and the other party, and documents are the next layer down. A contract can have as many documents as you need: the original agreement, amendments, statements of work, change orders, or anything else. Each document can have its own name, effective date and other data, including whether it affects the contract.

You now have two ways to store documents, and you can use either or both.

Document records, as in the legacy version, capture data about each document. The original agreement, for example, can have a description, whether it has an expiration term, and the contract effective and expiration dates it sets, with the file attached to the record.

Attachments skip the data entry. Drop files of any type into the Attachments panel: drag and drop several at once, or select Upload, then give the group a name and description. You can add links as well as files, as you can today. Open an attachment to view it in Lextree, download it, or edit its details.

Keep it as simple as you want or as complete as you need.

Obligations (formerly Requirements)

The legacy Requirements tab, where you may have tracked individual provisions or obligations of a contract, is now Obligations. All of that data has been migrated.

Obligations are an advanced feature, and not everyone uses them. Each obligation can record its nature (a duty, a right or a restriction), which party is obligated, and what type of obligation it is. Your administrators can customize these fields.

Calendar (formerly Alerts)

Alerts have been completely overhauled. You can attach them to many more kinds of records, configure them in more ways, and they all flow through to the main calendar.

The Calendar panel on a contract shows its events, such as a contract expiration reminder. Events can be generated automatically, so you don’t have to create them by hand, or added manually. To add one, select New and either choose a template, such as the contract expiration reminder, and answer a couple of questions, or create a blank event like any other calendar event.

Workflows (formerly Tasks)

A workflow is a task with a checklist. All of your legacy tasks and workflows have been migrated as workflows, whether a simple one-step task or a process with many steps. To start one on a contract, select New in the Workflows panel, then launch a template or start a blank workflow. See Workflows below for more.

Timeline

Every record in the new Lextree has a timeline. As things happen to a contract, a party or a document, Lextree records them on the timeline, automatically or manually, newest first. You can add a manual entry, such as noting that a contract was renewed, though an event like that would usually be recorded automatically or tied to the renewal date.

Replacing the View menu

The legacy View menu gave you a global view of parties, documents, alerts and tasks. The same views are in the new Lextree, in new places.

Every module, including Contracts, has a list for each kind of related record:

• Contract Parties lists every party on every contract with its party role, both your own organizations and counterparties. Filter the party role to “counter” to see only counterparties. Select any row to open it.
• Documents lists the document records across all your contracts.
• Obligations, formerly requirements, lists every obligation. Add to them or export them from here.

The Activity area replaces the rest of the View menu:

• Calendar replaces the alerts calendar.
• Attachments replaces the documents view. It lists every attachment across Lextree and what it is connected to.
• Workflows replaces the tasks view.

Counterparties

You will likely see the new Counterparties module turned on. It manages your relationship with the other party to your contracts, separate from any particular contract. Use it when you have several contracts with the same vendor, or review your vendors independently of their contracts.

A counterparty’s detail page has its own sections, such as Relationship, Compliance and Lifecycle, all about your relationship with that party rather than any one contract. On the right are the same Calendar, Attachments and Workflows panels, so you can track, for example, an insurance certificate that is about to expire.

Certificates of insurance are a common use for this module, because a COI applies to the counterparty independently of any single contract. A counterparty can also track:

• Insurance coverage requirements and insurance certificates.
• Tax documents, such as W-9s, with the actual form attached to the record.
• Business licenses, if the counterparty needs a special license for its work and you track it for compliance.
• Professional licenses, if you are in healthcare or another regulated industry where the counterparty’s people must be licensed.
• Certifications and attestations, if the vendor or supplier must attest to compliance with a federal or state law.

As with contracts, each of these has its own list across all counterparties. To see every business license you track, for example, open the business licenses list.

Activity: calendar, attachments and workflows

Calendar

The calendar works like the legacy alerts calendar but is much more comprehensive. Anything in Lextree that has a date can appear on it, whether or not you set an alert. View events as a list or by month, and select any event to see its details, jump to the record, or edit it.

You can now subscribe to the calendar from your personal or work calendar, one of our longest-standing requests. Copy the subscription URL and add it to your calendar app.

You can also filter the calendar by module, to see only contract events, or by organization.

Attachments

Attachments lists every file and link across Lextree, with the record each one is connected to.

Workflows

Workflows are a significant improvement over legacy tasks and workflows. They can be very simple or rich and detailed. A workflow for onboarding a new consulting agreement, for example, can include:

• Steps assigned to people. Different people can own different checklist items.
• Data collection at each step. A counterparty due diligence step can record that the review is complete and whether there are open issues. What you collect is customizable and can be structured.
• An activity panel that records each action automatically.
• Participants who work together, each notified as the workflow advances, with a progress bar showing how far along it is.
• Required steps.
• Calendar events and attachments of its own, generated automatically or added manually.

The most important difference from legacy workflows: a workflow can create the record for you. You can have the workflow build a draft of the new contract as it goes and create the record automatically when the workflow is complete.

Workflows are available on the Business and Enterprise plans.

Reports

The legacy Reports area gave you a view across your contract portfolio.

You may not need it for much of that anymore. A lot of what you used reports for is now available directly from the Registry. For example, filter the registry to exclude vendor contracts, select the contracts you want, and select Export. You get the same export you would get from a legacy report.

The new Reports area is much more powerful. It requires special permission, so you may not see it: an administrator in your organization has to give you access. Lextree ships with more than 80 preconfigured reports, and the ones you see depend on which modules are on.

You can modify any report or author your own:

• Open a report such as Active Contracts, select Edit, and add a column from the contract or its related information, such as contract value.
• Filter the results, for example to contracts with a value greater than 10,000.
• Save the configuration, or export the results.
• Create a new report from scratch, name it, and report on anything in Lextree. The more modules you have on, the more you can report on.

Trash

As in the legacy version, anything you delete goes to the Trash, where you can restore it.

Notification preferences

The legacy product let you turn weekly reminder emails on or off under My Account › Email Preferences. The new Lextree gives you much more control in your Profile, under Notification preferences.

For each area of the product, such as workflows, choose in-app notifications, email, or both. In-app notifications appear under the bell icon, where new ones show as unread and you can select any of them to see the details. Email can arrive as things happen, or as a daily or weekly digest.

Turning on other modules

Administrators can see all 21 modules under Settings › Modules. When a module is turned on, it appears in the navigation.

Whether to use a dedicated module or the Contracts module is up to you:

• Grants. If you handle only a few grants, track them as a contract type in Contracts. If you handle many and have special tracking requirements, the Grants module is included in your subscription.
• Licenses, permits and certifications. For many organizations, tracking them in Counterparties is enough. If you have many of them, with special tracking and data requirements, turn on the Licenses and Permits module.

Every module you turn on is available in reports, and its records can have workflows, attachments and calendar events.

Next steps

This guide covers the contract management features of the legacy product from the day-to-day user’s perspective. If you also manage legal entities, see Upgrading from Lextree for Entity Management. Both guides are on the upgrade page.

You can find more about the new Lextree at lextree.ai. Questions? Email our support team at [email protected].