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Hi DocuSign Community,
I'm working with a legal team that uses DocuSign CLM for contract redlining and I'm looking for community input on how others have approached a fairly complex set of approval tracking requirements. We had a proposed solution that didn't get approved internally, so we're going back to the drawing board and would love to hear how others have tackled similar challenges.
Background
The legal team's core frustration is that while CLM handles task-driven approvals well, it falls short when it comes to ad hoc approvals, parallel review workflows, and end-to-end audit trails. They've been using an Excel spreadsheet as a workaround to track approvals, which is becoming unmanageable.
Key Requirements We're Trying to Solve
1. Section-Level Approval Requests The team wants to be able to select specific language within a document, like with the CLM Comments feature, and initiate an approval request based on that selection — ideally from within the document interface itself (e.g., a dropdown or task tab). Has anyone implemented something like this natively in CLM, or used a workaround?
2. Directing Approvals to Specific Individuals Rather than relying solely on predefined workflow routing, the team needs the ability to direct an approval request to a named individual on an ad hoc basis. Has anyone used the @ tagging feature successfully for this, or found an alternative approach?
3. Three-Option Approval Responses Approvers need to respond with one of three options:
- ✅ Approve
- ❌ Reject
- ✏️ Approve as Modified
All three options should support an accompanying note. We need to be able to report on the Approver’s response, what specific text they were reviewing, what edits to the text they made if any, any comments they make, as well how long it took them to respond. Does anyone have ideas how I could accomplish all of these requirements at the same time without the end user taking multiple steps to make it happen?
4. Parallel Approvals Without Locking the Document A key pain point is that the current process halts all other workflow actions while a document is with a reviewer. The team needs the ability to:
- Send to multiple approvers simultaneously
- Allow the legal team to continue working on the document during review
- Consolidate all approver responses (including notes) into a single master record
How have others handled parallel approval workflows in CLM without creating document locking issues?
5. Full Approval Audit Trail Across All Versions All approvals — regardless of when they occur in the contract lifecycle — need to be tracked with:
- Date & time
- Approver name
- Decision (Approve/Reject/Approve as Modified)
- Specific text approved
- Edits to specific text approved.
- Notes or the specific highlighted section reviewed
This tracking needs to persist across all document versions in real time and be reportable after finalization. Has anyone built this out using CLM attributes, a connected spreadsheet, or a reporting tool?
6. Documenting Offline Approvals This one is particularly tricky — sometimes approvals happen outside of CLM entirely (e.g., a phone call or a Teams conversation). The team needs a way to manually log these offline approvals into the same central tracking record so everything is in one place. Has anyone solved for this? Custom attributes? A manual entry form?
What We've Considered
We explored a solution involving a combination of CLM task configuration + CLM Comment Feature, attribute tracking, and a connected spreadsheet for audit purposes, but it didn't get sign-off internally. We're now looking at whether there's a cleaner native approach or a well-proven community solution we may have missed.
Questions for the Community
- Have you solved any of these requirements natively in DocuSign CLM?
- Are there third-party integrations or add-ons worth exploring?
- Are any of these requirements simply outside of what CLM can support today, and if so, how did you work around them?
Any guidance, case studies, or even confirmation that others have hit the same walls would be really helpful. Thanks in advance! 🙏