Aline keeps your entire contract lifecycle — drafting, internal approvals, counterparty negotiation, redlining, and signature — in one place. This guide is written for legal and operations teams who want to launch a template, run a collaborative review with internal stakeholders and counterparties, and gate signature behind one or more approval phases.

If you just need the basic launch flow, see Create a Workflow from a Template. This article picks up from there and focuses on the review, redlining, version control, and multi-phase approval pieces.

Use this guide when you want to:

Most confusion in a review phase comes from mixing up these two roles. They are not the same thing:

The two roles see different things in the task, which is why a reviewer and an assignee looking at the same workflow will not have the same buttons.

⚠️ A counterparty must always be added as a reviewer, never as an assignee. A reviewer only ever sees the external side of the task. An assignee can see internal activity, which is not what you want an outside party reading.

💡 An assignee who realises mid-task that someone else needs to weigh in can add that person as a reviewer themselves — you do not have to rebuild the phase.

💡 A consistent naming convention makes it easier to find and track workflows later.

You'll be guided through assigning:

💡 Don't know who the counterparty signer is yet? You can leave it blank and add them later. If a launch-form field is assigned to a signatory and the submitter leaves it empty, the counterparty can fill it in themselves when they open the document.

At the bottom of the assignment screen, you'll see options to connect to your CRM. Aline integrates with HubSpot, Salesforce, and several other CRMs.

Connecting a CRM lets you use Aline as a document generation tool — fields like company name, deal value, contact details, and contract terms are imported directly from the matching record so you don't have to type them in manually.

Click Continue when you're done.

Before the document goes out for signature or collaboration, you'll have a chance to manipulate it. Two common patterns:

Click Continue when the document is ready.

You can add an external email address as a required reviewer on any template task. When the workflow launches — from Aline, Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack or Microsoft Teams — that person receives a link straight to the task.

The counterparty does not need an Aline account and does not need a seat. They click the link, open the task, read the document, and respond. They see only the document you shared with them — not your repository, not your AI, and nothing else in your workspace.

To build the phase:

📌 Keep the counterparty's review as a single task rather than splitting it across two — a split task makes the round trip harder to follow on both sides.

💡 To require counterparty review on every launch, put this phase first in the template. To approve internally before anything goes out, add a phase above it and set the reviewer to workflow launcher rather than the counterparty.

⚠️ If the counterparty already has an Aline account on that email address, they will be asked to sign in rather than getting straight in through the link.

A task description has two separate fields:

The activity feed is split the same way. Your team has an internal lane, the counterparty has an external one, and counterparties never see internal notes or AI instructions. You can also keep specific workflow files hidden from counterparties entirely.

Aline AI can be assigned to a task exactly like a person. The task description is its instructions, and you can tag a playbook, a skill, or reference files for it to work from.

For example, assign the AI a task reading: read the document and check for redlines altering any legal language; if you find any, assign to Jim — if not, complete the task. The AI runs the check, routes to a human when it finds something, and closes the task itself when it doesn't.

⚠️ An AI task starts the moment the task opens. If you are still editing the document when the phase begins, the AI may read the earlier version and finish before your change lands. Put AI review in its own later phase rather than alongside work that is still in progress.

💡 The AI can also compare a finalised document against your standard template to catch legal provisions that were changed and accepted earlier in the negotiation. See Conditional Routing & Advanced Workflow Logic for the routing logic and Building AI Playbooks for tagging a playbook.

When the counterparty opens the task they can approve the document or request changes. If they redline it, those changes come back as tracked changes.

⚠️ Once anyone redlines a document, the Approve button is no longer available to them — the only way forward is Submit changes. This is intentional: a marked-up document cannot be approved as-is.

On your side:

You can also instruct Aline AI in plain language — change governing law to New York per the counterparty's request — and it adds the edit as a tracked change you can accept and send back for re-review inside the same task.

📌 While the document is with you, it is with you. The counterparty only sees what you have done once you request re-review.

⚠️ Counterparties work in suggesting mode, so anything they change arrives as a redline rather than a silent edit. On a PDF they can comment but cannot redline at all — send Word (.docx) if you want marked-up text back. See File Format Requirements & PDF-to-Word Conversion.

A task can have more than one assignee — a useful pattern when either of two people could pick it up. Whoever takes it can remove the other.

You can also add subtasks and hand them to your team, outside counsel, or Aline AI. A subtask that turns out not to be needed can simply be skipped — for example, review legal language if needed assigned to your lawyer, skipped when nothing legal changed.

On the next page you'll see your options. Note that Send for Signature is intentionally locked until internal sign-off is complete.

⚠️ This gate exists so signature can't accidentally happen before required approvals. Until sign-off is done, your only options are to keep collaborating internally, keep the document with the counterparty, or save it as a draft.

💡 This is one of the most valuable parts of Aline — every approval and sign-off is tracked and visible to the team.

If a counterparty returns a redlined copy outside of Aline, you don't need to start over.

Every document keeps its own version history, so Aline does not create a second copy. See Updating a Template Document with Version History.

When redlines are finalized and you're ready to move forward, return to the workflow, mark your task Complete, and optionally add a note and tag teammates to capture context. Once your phase is complete, the next phase launches automatically.

Two things worth knowing about completing tasks:

📌 Completing a counterparty review without requesting another round notifies both sides that every change has been accepted and the task is closed.

Approvals in Aline are organized into phases. You can configure as many phases as you need.

Parallel approvals — put multiple reviewers in the same phase. Everyone in that phase can complete their tasks at the same time.

Sequential approvals — put each reviewer (or group) in their own phase. For example:

Each phase is launched automatically once the previous one is complete. Every sign-off is recorded so you have a clear audit trail.

⚠️ Document access on a workflow is set at template level and applies to every workflow launched from it. A teammate on a Basic seat may open the document as a Suggester with viewer rights to the workflow — an admin will not hit that limit, which is why admins sometimes cannot reproduce a colleague's access problem. See Account Types in Aline (Admin, Full, Basic, Viewer) and What does each editing role allow in a document?.

Once all approval phases are complete, the workflow owner (or manager) can send the document for signature.

✅ Completed phases stay visible on the summary page so you always have a history of who signed off and when. For signing order, groups and carbon copies, see Advanced Signature Workflows: Order, Groups & Templates.

If you have questions, click the Support button in Aline to reach our team in Slack, or email us directly.