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.

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.

Terms are your legal language. You write them in Common Paper or upload a file, and you can update them whenever your legal position changes. Common Paper calls them custom Terms when it needs to tell them apart from the Common Paper Standard Terms.

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.

Most Custom Agreements pair a Cover Page with a set of Terms, so you'll usually create your Terms first and then build a Cover Page that references them. A Cover Page can also stand on its own, with no Terms behind it, which suits short forms and signature pages that don't need separate legal terms.

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.

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. The menu follows the order an admin sets on the Reorder your templates page. See Templates and template settings for how to change it.

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:

If you already know how to send a Common Paper agreement, you already know how to send a Custom Agreement.

Your Cover Page templates are listed on the Templates page, in the same list as your Standard Agreement templates. The Terms column tells them apart:

Your Terms have their own page. Click Manage your Terms at the top of the Templates page to open Your Terms, which lists each set of Terms and the templates that use it.

Word or PDF documents you upload to send out as-is, without a Cover Page form, are listed separately under Signature-only templates, below the main list. See Uploaded Templates.

To start a new Custom Agreement, click Add new template on the Templates page, then choose Set up a custom agreement under Write your own. This starts with your Terms, then lets you build the Cover Page that uses them.

Both 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 on the Templates page tells you how many signed agreements depend on a given template, which is a useful check before you make a significant change.