Contract Hierarchy

Contracts rarely live in isolation. A Master Services Agreement governs the SOWs beneath it. A master lease sits above every site-level amendment. An umbrella agreement sets terms for every satellite contract the counterparty signs. Understanding which contract governs which is a core diligence task. Without a view that shows the structure, you are digging through filenames trying to remember what references what.

Contract Hierarchy is the view that shows the structure.

Auto-Detection from the Structure Pass

The AI's first analysis pass reads the document for its skeleton: document type, sections, references to other agreements. When it sees phrases like "pursuant to the Master Services Agreement dated January 14, 2023" or "this Amendment modifies the foregoing Supply Agreement," it captures those references.

Those references become proposed parent-child links between contracts in the same project. The detection happens during analysis, with no manual tagging and no dragging nodes around. The hierarchy is built automatically during analysis.

The Canvas View

The hierarchy renders as a graph. Each contract is a node showing its document-type badge and name. Lines connect children up to their parents. Masters sit at the top of their subtree; amendments, SOWs, and addenda branch below.

• Pan: click and drag the canvas.
• Zoom: scroll wheel or pinch.
• Click a node: jumps to that contract's page.

Big trees fit the viewport; small ones do not waste space. The canvas is read-only in v1: no drag-to-link, no reparenting by dragging. All reparenting happens on the contract page itself.

Manual Parent Assignment

Auto-detection is not always perfect. A scanned amendment with a fuzzy reference, a contract that names the master document by an informal nickname, a case where the AI's confidence was too low to commit to a link: you will see these in the canvas as floating nodes that should have a parent.

On any contract's page there's a Parent field. Set it, change it, clear it. The link updates in the canvas immediately.

TIP

Manual overrides stick through re-analysis. If you've corrected a parent link, running analysis again won't revert it.

What Hierarchy Is Used For Today

In v1, Contract Hierarchy is purely visual and navigational. You can see the structure of the deal's paper at a glance and click through between related contracts without hunting in the Documents list. For a deal team trying to orient itself on a complex counterparty, that is most of the value.

The matrix itself still treats each contract independently. The governing law cell on an SOW shows what that SOW says, not what the parent MSA says.

What's Planned

Conditional cross-contract logic is on the backlog. The intended behavior: "if the MSA is governed by Delaware, every SOW inherits Delaware unless explicitly overridden." Same idea for assignment clauses, change-of-control, limitation of liability: anywhere a parent's term propagates to its children by default.

This is the next major use of the hierarchy graph. It is not in the current build.

TIP

If you are mid-diligence on a complex counterparty, the canvas is where you will recognize the full agreement structure at a glance. Open it before working the matrix.

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→ For more detail, see Uploading Contracts. → For more detail, see Running AI Analysis.