Uploading contracts

Supported formats, size limits, and the three ways to upload — drag-and-drop, from a URL, or via a connected AI Agent.

Updated 11 Aug 2026

Clment accepts most everyday contract formats. This page covers what works, what doesn’t, and the three ways to get a contract into Clment.

Supported formats

  • PDF — including scanned PDFs (OCR runs automatically).
  • Word — .docx (modern Word). For older .doc files, open in Word and save as .docx first.

Not supported: plain-text (.txt) files, images on their own (.png, .jpg), encrypted / password-protected PDFs, files larger than 100 MB.

If your file is bigger than 100 MB it’s usually because of embedded images. Re-export from Word as PDF with Standard quality or use Acrobat’s Reduce file size.

Three ways to upload

1. Drag and drop

The fastest path. From the Contracts page, click + Upload to open the upload screen, then drag files onto the drop zone — or click it to pick from a file dialog.

You can upload several contracts at once. Drop or select as many as you like: each gets its own row showing upload and processing progress, and they process in parallel, so the wall-clock time scales reasonably well even for dozens of files. As each one finishes, its row shows the detected contract type and a Start AI Review / Compare button, so you can go straight from upload into a review without opening the contract first.

For very large migrations (hundreds of contracts, or anything coming off a system with an API), contact support — we can run a one-time bulk import for you.

2. Upload from a URL

On Contracts → + Upload, paste a public link into the URL field instead of choosing a file. Clment fetches the document and ingests it as a new contract — handy for public terms of service, supplier templates, or anything already hosted online. This is the simplest way to bring in a contract you can link to.

URLs must be publicly resolvable HTTPS. Protected SharePoint / Google Drive links won’t work without an export token — download those and drag them in instead.

Clment spots referenced documents for you. Contracts often incorporate other documents by reference — a linked Terms of Service, master agreement, DPA, privacy policy, SLA, or EULA. Whichever way you upload, Clment scans the contract for those links and, when it finds them, shows a banner on the contract page offering to Attach each one. Attaching fetches the linked document over HTTPS and adds it as a supporting document, so a review can consider the whole set together. They’re suggestions — attach the ones that matter, dismiss the rest, and Clment leaves the main contract untouched either way.

3. Upload via a connected AI Agent

If you’ve connected an AI Agent — Claude, ChatGPT, or Microsoft Copilot (see Connecting Claude Desktop) — you can drive uploads from your chat without opening the Clment web app. Two ways:

  • From a URL — for example: “Upload the latest version of the GitLab terms from gitlab.com/terms and start a review.” The agent calls Clment’s upload_contract_from_url skill: it downloads the URL, ingests it, and (if you asked) starts a review immediately.
  • From local files — attach a few PDFs to the chat and ask: “Upload these contracts and start a review.” The agent calls the request_contract_upload skill: Clment mints a one-time, short-lived upload link and the agent pushes the file bytes directly (up to 100 MB each).

One-time setup for sandboxed agents (e.g. Claude in the browser, which runs its HTTP tools in a locked-down sandbox): the agent can’t reach Clment until you allow it. If an upload fails with a “host not in allowlist” error, add your Clment region’s API host — the host shown in that error, for example api-au.clment.com — to the agent’s allowed-domains / network setting, then ask it to try again. Agents whose HTTP tools aren’t sandboxed don’t need this step — but many are (Claude’s agent sandbox included), so if you see the error, just add the host.

What happens after upload

  1. Text extraction — Clment pulls the text layer from the PDF / Word file. Scanned PDFs go through OCR (≈10–20 seconds extra per scanned page).
  2. CLM number — every contract gets a stable identifier like CLM-128, allocated atomically so two simultaneous uploads can never collide.
  3. Initial classification — Clment AI suggests a contract type (NDA, MSA, SoW, etc.) and pulls out the parties, signing date, term, and renewal trigger. You can correct any of these inline.
  4. Indexing — the contract is embedded and added to your portfolio search index so you can ask cross-contract questions like “which of our vendor agreements have unlimited liability?”

If extraction fails (corrupt file, exotic Word features, encrypted PDF), you’ll see a clear error on the contract page with a Re-upload button.

Scanned and low-quality documents

Clment reads scanned PDFs automatically — there’s nothing special to do to upload one. If a scan comes through rough (faint print, skewed pages, marks on the page), Clment notices and helps in two ways:

  • Repair for review. When you start a review on a low-quality scan, Clment offers Repair document (recommended) — its AI reads the whole document and rebuilds a clean, accurate copy of the text first, so the review works from what the contract actually says rather than a garbled read. The repaired text is reused for later reviews of the same document, so you only pay for it once.
  • Fresh Start for editing. To edit or redline a scan, choose Fresh Start when converting it to Word (see Editing in Word & Docs) — it rebuilds the contract as clean, editable Word, with anything it couldn’t confirm from the scan flagged as a comment for you to check.

Very poor scans can still lose the odd figure or word — Clment flags what it wasn’t sure about rather than guessing, so you know exactly what to double-check against the original.

See also

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