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For AI agents: a documentation index is available at https://docs.coverbase.com/llms.txt. This page is also available in markdown by appending .md to the URL.
This page is part of the User Guides collection and goes with the Contract Guardian guide, which covers clause sets end to end. Read this one when your standard is a document rather than a spreadsheet.
Most companies already have their standard written down as a contract: the MSA you send first, the DPA your privacy team maintains, the security addendum you attach to anything touching customer data. Upload Baseline Contract reads one of those and turns it into a clause set, so your playbook starts from language you already use rather than a blank page.
This is one of four ways to build a clause set. The others are copying the packaged library, importing a spreadsheet, and adding clauses by hand. They mix freely: generate from your paper, then paste in the two clauses your template forgot.

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Which import do I want?

The two upload paths solve different problems, and picking the wrong one costs an afternoon.

Upload Baseline Contract

You have a contract. Coverbase reads the PDF and proposes the clauses, with the exact source text quoted. Fastest way from “we have a template” to a working set, but every clause arrives with one tier, so you finish the tiering by hand.

Import from Spreadsheet

You have a playbook. Your standards already exist as structured rows, probably with fallback positions. You get exactly what you typed, including full multi-tier variant language, and nothing is inferred.
A common sequence: generate from your paper to get the clause inventory, then hand-write the fallback tiers in the UI. If your team already maintains a negotiation matrix, skip extraction and import the spreadsheet.

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Run an extraction

1

Upload the baseline

On Configuration → Clause Sets, open Add Clause Set and choose Upload Baseline Contract. Submit your template as a PDF.Use a clean template, not an executed agreement. A signed contract carries one counterparty’s negotiated edits, and you’ll be baking their redlines into your standard.
2

Wait for processing

Extraction runs in the background; you can leave the page and come back. The clause set appears immediately with a processing indicator and fills in as the run completes.
3

Review what it extracted

Each proposed clause arrives with a name, category, severity, applicable component types, and the exact source text it came from, with a page citation you can check against your document.
4

Add your fallback tiers

This is the step people skip, and it’s the one that matters. See What you have to finish below.
5

Activate it

Generated clause sets are created inactive on purpose, so a half-finished playbook can’t be run against a live contract. Flip it to active once the tiers are in.

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What you get back

Each extracted clause is a normal reference clause, so you can edit, retier, or archive any of it.
Language it can’t quote verbatim is dropped, not paraphrased. Every extracted clause and every piece of source evidence is checked back against the text of the document it cites; anything that doesn’t appear there contiguously is discarded. You may get fewer clauses than you expected, and that’s the trade: what you do get is genuinely your paper, not a model’s summary of it.

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What you have to finish

A single Tier 1 variant is a floor, not a playbook. It marks anything that isn’t your exact template language as needing review, which, on a real vendor’s paper, is almost everything. Run a set in that state and your first review will be wall-to-wall deviations.
Before you point a generated set at a live contract:
  1. Add the tiers you’d actually accept. For each clause that matters, write the Tier 2 (“acceptable”) and Tier 3 (“fallback”) language your legal team would sign without escalating. This is the work that turns noise into signal.
  2. Fill in the Guidance field. Extraction doesn’t write the aliases and extraction signals that help the matcher find a clause under a different heading. The Contract Guardian guide shows the four-section format.
  3. Retune severities. Reserve Critical for clauses that would genuinely block a signature.
  4. Archive what you don’t care about. A template contains boilerplate you have no opinion on. Every clause you keep is a clause every review has to triage.
  5. Test against a contract you already know, then activate.

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Troubleshooting