Custom Agreements let you build an agreement out of your own legal terms and your own Cover Page, instead of using one of the Standard Agreements that Common Paper publishes. Everything else about the agreement works the same way: you send it, negotiate it, sign it, and get a PDF at the end.
NOTE: Custom Agreements are currently available to select customers. Reach out through the support bubble in the lower right corner if you'd like access.
The two parts of a Custom Agreement
Every Common Paper agreement has the same shape: a set of terms that carry the legal language, and a Cover Page that holds the variables both parties negotiate. Custom Agreements keep that structure and let you supply both halves.
Custom Terms are your legal terms. You write them in Common Paper or upload a file, and you can update them whenever your legal position changes.
Cover Pages are the form your team fills out when creating an agreement. You define the sections and fields, and those fields become the negotiable variables on the finished agreement.
A Custom Agreement is a Cover Page paired with a set of Custom Terms. Neither half does much on its own, so you'll usually create your Custom Terms first and then build a Cover Page that references them.
How this differs from a Standard Agreement
With a Standard Agreement, Common Paper supplies both the Standard Terms and the Cover Page fields. You choose values for the variables, but you can't change which variables exist or what the terms say.
With a Custom Agreement, you own both. That means you can write terms specific to your business and put exactly the fields you need on the Cover Page, including fields that have no equivalent in any Standard Agreement.
The tradeoff is that you're responsible for keeping the two halves compatible. If your terms reference a field, that field needs to exist on your Cover Page.
Sending and signing a Custom Agreement
The customization stops once the template exists. Building a Custom Agreement is a different job from your usual work in Common Paper, but sending one is not: from the moment you create an agreement, everything works exactly as it does for a Standard Agreement.
Your Cover Page templates appear in the same Create or import an agreement menu as your Standard Agreement templates, listed together rather than in a separate group.
Choosing one opens the same Send a new agreement page you already know, with the same sender organization, recipient details, signer and signing order, negotiation toggle, reminder and expiration settings, and send options.
After you send, every part of the agreement lifecycle behaves the same way:
Recipients review, negotiate, and propose changes, subject to your Allow Negotiation setting
Signing and countersigning follow your signing order
Completed agreements download as PDF or DOCX
Signers can be reassigned, and agreements can be voided or amended
Agreement history, activity notifications, search, and filters all work as usual
If you already know how to send a Common Paper agreement, you already know how to send a Custom Agreement.
Where Custom Agreements live
Custom Agreements are managed on the Templates page under the Custom templates tab. You'll see two tables:
Cover Pages lists each Cover Page template, its display name, its current version, and how many completed agreements use it.
Custom Terms lists each set of terms, its current version, and how many completed agreements use it.
Your Standard Agreement templates stay where they've always been, on the Standard templates tab.
Versions
Both Custom Terms and Cover Pages are versioned. Each time you save a change, Common Paper creates a new version and that version becomes the one new agreements are built from.
Agreements already in flight or already completed stay pinned to the version they were created from. Updating your terms never changes an agreement someone has already signed.
The Completed Agreements column tells you how many signed agreements depend on a given template, which is a useful check before you make a significant change.