Rooms & Sub-Rooms
Last updated: September 1, 2026
Rooms are how Ivo Intelligence organizes your contract portfolio, and how access is controlled. Get the Room structure right and everything downstream gets easier: contracts land in the right place, permissions stay clean, and Assistant answers questions against exactly the documents you intend.
What Rooms and Sub-Rooms do
Rooms organize contracts into separate, controlled spaces within Repository. Use them to isolate a project (an acquisition, a vendor audit) or to separate contract types by business unit, deal side, or region. Access is granted at the Room level, to teams and users, not contract by contract. Everyone in your workspace has access to the Default Room.
Sub-Rooms nest inside a Room, effectively a folder structure that can nest multiple levels deep (for example, a parent Buy-side Room with a Buy-side Government Sub-Room). Documents uploaded to a Sub-Room roll up: from a parent Room you can choose to include its Sub-Rooms and query them all together.
Tip: Upload into the most specific Sub-Room that fits. One upload covers every query scope above it.
Four behaviors that shape everything else
Assistant queries are scoped to what you specifiy. Run Assistant across your whole Repository, or narrow it to a single Room. From a parent Room you can choose to include its Sub-Rooms; querying a Sub-Room covers just that slice.
Access flows downward. Parent-Room access automatically extends to Sub-Rooms (Sub-Room access does not extend to the parent). Permissions can be expanded for specific users or teams at the Sub-Room level.
Relationships stay inside the Room. Ivo links related agreements (such as amendments) only within a Room hierarchy, and never reveals that a related agreement exists in a Room a user cannot access.
The flattened view toggle controls whether Sub-Room documents appear in the parent Room (on by default).
Best practices
There is no single correct structure. The right one mirrors how your team thinks about its contracts and the questions you will ask Assistant. Two proven starting points:
Replicate your existing CLM or drive structure. Instant familiarity, and pairs naturally with a SharePoint or Google Drive sync.
Start fresh around how you query. Organize by deal side, document type, relationship type, or business segment, with Sub-Rooms for granularity.
Structures other Ivo customers use
Pattern | Example structure | Why it works in Ivo |
|---|---|---|
By deal side + document type | Top-level Rooms for Sell-side, Buy-side, and NDAs, with Sub-Rooms branching under each parent (e.g. Buy-side > Buy-side Government). | Clean Assistant query scopes: ask at the parent for everything on that deal side, or in a Sub-Room for just that slice. |
By relationship type | Parent Rooms such as Customer Agreements, Partner Agreements, and Vendor Agreements, with Sub-Rooms for specific categories (e.g. partner types). | Permissions map to ownership: grant each team only its Room, while related agreements stay linked within the hierarchy. |
By business segment | Sub-Rooms per segment under a parent (e.g. Customer Agreements > Government Agreements > Healthcare, Education, Federal Government). | Sub-Room roll-up: segment-level analysis in each Sub-Room, portfolio-wide questions at the parent, from one upload. |
By matter / deal | A Room per transaction or diligence project (e.g. an M&A data room), deleted when the matter closes. | Access stays scoped to the deal team, and the Room can be deleted cleanly when the project ends. |
A catch-all Room (alongside any of the above) | One Room that holds every contract, kept in addition to your other Rooms and Sub-Rooms. | Gives you a single place to run an Assistant query against all agreements at once, without querying each Room separately. |
Quick tips
Keep related agreements together. Parent agreements, amendments, and side letters should live in the same Room (or the same parent hierarchy).
Design for permissions early. Decide whether access is open or split by Room, and grant Rooms to teams rather than individuals.
Keep nesting shallow. Two to three levels (Room > Sub-Room > Sub-Sub-Room) is plenty.
Rename the Default Room to something meaningful, or use it as a triage inbox you sort regularly.
Quarantine non-contracts. Keep drafts and templates in a dedicated Room (e.g. "Drafts / Templates") so executed-contract queries stay clean.
Point syncs at the right Room. Confirm the destination Room when configuring a SharePoint or Google Drive sync.
Common questions
Can I delete the Default Room?
No. It can be renamed at any time, and many customers rename it to match its contents (e.g. "NDAs"). Everyone in the workspace has access to it by default.
What happens when I delete a Room?
Deletion is permanent and cannot be undone. Deleting a parent Room deletes all of its Sub-Rooms and their documents. Move anything you want to keep into another Room first.
Can Assistant search across all my Rooms?
Yes, if you tell it to. Assistant can run against your entire Repository, or you can scope it to a single Room. From a parent Room you can also choose whether to include its Sub-Rooms. Scoping to one Room is useful when you want answers drawn from a defined set of agreements and nothing else; searching everything is useful for portfolio-wide questions.
Who can see a Sub-Room?
Anyone with parent-Room access automatically has the same access to its Sub-Rooms. Sub-Room access alone does not grant parent access. You can grant specific users or teams expanded permissions (e.g. Editor) on an individual Sub-Room. Room permissions expand, never restrict, a user's workspace-level role, so a Repository Admin always sees all Rooms.
Will Ivo link related contracts that sit in different Rooms?
No. Relationships (such as parent agreements, amendments, and side letters) are detected within a Room hierarchy only, and Ivo will not reveal a related agreement in a Room the user cannot access. Keep families of related agreements together.
What if the same document ends up in more than one place?
Ivo rejects exact-duplicate uploads, even with different file names. The same contract can deliberately live in multiple Rooms: it is processed once and counts once toward your document limit.
How do I move documents between Rooms?
Select the documents in a view and choose Move to Room (or Copy to Room to keep them in both places). Moving or copying does not re-process the documents or count them again. Only a fresh upload does.
Why don't I see Sub-Room documents in the parent Room?
Check the Sub-Rooms (flattened view) toggle at the top of the parent Room. It is on by default but can be toggled off.
Do AI Fields and views carry across Rooms?
AI Fields are workspace-level: build one once and toggle it on in any other Room or view, with no rebuilding. When copying documents to a new Sub-Room, remember to toggle the fields on there too. Views are Room-level: they stay in the Room you built them in, so recreate key views where you need them.