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Contracting Workflows

Themis Contract aims to speed up the process of contracting while simultaneously allowing for better-tracked contract negotiation (better than having to track endless e-mail trails).

By leveraging the power of GitHub/GitLab and Git, we automatically get the following for free:

  • Discussions on desired changes (to parameters and/or contract text)
  • Permissioned merging of changes (when using pull/merge requests)
  • Version control history (with optional cryptographic integrity checks if Git commits have to be signed when submitted)

Let's take a look at some simple workflow examples that could help to make your contracting experience easier.

Example 1: Negotiating contract text with lawyers

If your lawyers are open to negotiating contracts in Markdown via GitHub/GitLab pull/merge requests, then this is the workflow for you. Usually in this case you'd be deliberating on the text of the contract itself, and not so much the parameters.

  1. Create a Git repository
  2. Push your initial contract, template and parameters files.
  3. Open up a pull/merge request with the desired changes to the template text.
  4. Deliberate changes through the GitHub/GitLab UI.
  5. Once all parties agree that the contract text is acceptable, someone needs to update the contract.dhall file (themis-contract update), commit it to the pull/merge request, and merge it all.

Now you have all deliberations and conversations tracked in one place, and a full commit history of who modified which part of the contract when (and hopefully why they made those modifications in the commit messages).

Example 2: Negotiating with counterparties

Generally when you're negotiating with counterparties, you'd hopefully have a contract template that was already approved by your lawyers (as per example 1 above). Most of the time here you'd only really be negotiating on parameters (your params.dhall file), but sometimes counterparties want minor modifications to the template text itself.

In this case, you'd need to:

  1. Have your upstream contract (pre-negotiated with your lawyers) at the ready. This should hopefully be stored in a Git repository.
  2. Set up your new contract either inside a new Git repository or inside an existing one (but ideally not alongside your upstream):
mkdir new-contract

# Uses the upstream contract in your `contract-templates` repository, while
# setting the new contract's remote origin to your `new-contract` repository 
themis-contract new \
    git://[email protected]/you/contract-templates.git/service-agreement/contract.dhall \
    --git-remote git://[email protected]/you/new-contract.git

# Optionally leave out the --git-remote if you're creating a contract in an
# existing Git repository or if you'd prefer to configure the remote yourself
themis-contract new \
    git://[email protected]/you/contract-templates.git/service-agreement/contract.dhall
  1. Open up a pull/merge request to negotiate changes to the params.dhall and template.md files.
  2. Once everyone's happy with the contract, sign it (themis-contract sign) and push the signatures to the pull/merge request.
  3. Merge all signatures in and you've got a signed contract.

If you've changed something in the template.md file and would like to see how different the new contract's text is from the upstream's, Themis Contract provides a shortcut for you:

# Show a diff between our `template.md` and the upstream's `template.md` files
themis-contract upstream diff

Next Steps

More tutorials will be coming soon!