Document Assembly & Case Management Blog

Have you ever considered going truly “PAPERLESS”?  If you do, did you plan on telling your clients?  And what do you do with all their STUFF? The answer may lie in your client engagement letter.  So long as you disclose to your client what you are going to do with the documents in his/her case, and so long as you keep originals of those documents you are legally and ethically required to keep, you should be in a position to go paperless without increasing your risk of malpractice.  Wells Anderson and I have developed some model language that you can you in your engagement letter.  We give it with the caveat that while we are lawyers, we are likely not admitted to practice in your jurisdiction, and second we are not offering this language as legal advice.  We are asking you to consider this language and review it in light of your firm’s document retention procedures and your state’s legal and ethical requirements regarding document retention.

If you are reading this blog/blawg/weblog, you get “document assembly”.  You understand its power as a productivity multiplier.  You know how it transforms the practice of law and business.  You see the tangible results in improved work product and faster turnaround.  THAT IS GOOD.  But have you factored in the cost of deployment.  You can have “cheap” desktop software which allows you to make the system available to a limited group at very low cost.  But what happens to that cost when you wish to extend the benefits of automation to a wider group, say 20 to 50 users, maybe 100 to 500 users. It is then that the economies of scale weigh in favor of buying a ROBUST web-server based document assembly system.  There is a middle step of deploying the desktop software through Citrix or Terminal Services, but even such approach requires configuration costs, maintaining profiles and updates and the other consequent costs of an individual deployment and support.

Back in April, when the first breath of spring was in the air, my son and I went out to the garden plot, shovel in hand.  We applied manure, peat moss and other natural fertilizers and turned over the soil We then chopped up a number of spuds (with eyes) and stuck them deep in the soil (six inches under).  We also planted two rows of peas (snap peas and sugar peas). And then we sat back and waited, and waited.  The nights were still cold, and some of the days were cold.

If you have visited Bashasys.com in the past, you might come back and take a look.  Be sure to click the REFRESH button (Control-F5) to clear your browser cache.  Today we are launching a totally rebuilt website.  Bear with us as we iron out the kinks.  Over the past month, we have ported several hundred pages of contact from coded-HTML pages into Joomla Content Management System.  With Joomla, there is improved navigation, system-wide search, and the ability to print any article you see to PDF.  More important for us, with its ease of editing, you will find the site more regularly updated with new and revised content to keep pace with the ever changing technology market.

In this time of economic downturn, a number of firms are looking at making Staff cuts.  And one of the areas they are looking hard at is word-processing.  There has been an aggressive pitch by “vendors” offering to outsource the word-processing department.  With the advent of high-speed color scanners and high-speed internet, it is possible to send your document (or your dictation) around the world, and have it delivered back to you 24x7.  With worldwide networks and hosted document repositories, it is possible to have a service provide with offices in every major time zone.  And so, what is missing in the bid by these vendors for your work. What are some of the choices. 

I posted the following topic on the Legal Innovation group on LinkedIn:  Is Nolo Press (www.nolo.com) an innovator, a “threat”, or just a nuisance? Nolo Press ( http://www.nolo.com/ ) started out as a counter-culture response to the high cost of lawyering for the “average Joe”. It has morphs from “legal kits” to online legal forms and rakes in tens of millions of dollars a year. I got some interesting responses that I thought worth posting here.

FREE is not FREE.  We in the legal practice management community live in a “bubble”.  Because of our “unique needs” and “limited budgets” lawyers and professional service organizations, have been able to attract a unique set of software tools for drafting our documents and managing our business.  Among these tools are document assembly software packages like HotDocs, GhostFIll, DealBuilder and Exari.  And among the practice management tools are ones like Time Matters, Amicus Attorney and PracticeMaster.  These tools are well developed, with development histories of over a decade or two decades of use.  And these tools are “Rapid Development” platforms that enable developers and consultants to build powerful and highly customized solutions for their clients.

It is true there are OTHER tools that can be used for managing contact information and for automating forms.  These other tools are “free” since many of them are included with the licenses to products many already use.  InfoPath is included with the enterprise version of Microsoft Office; SharePoint Services is included with many versions of Windows Server. And because these tools are “free” and because larger organizations have dedicated programming staff to build solutions with these tools, there is a tendency outside of LEGAL, to use these tools instead. THIS is a mistake.

This morning I received an email from mindspring.net offering outsourced legal services in India:  research, transactions, document coding, drafting services, all at prices that would be a fraction of the cost of having a paralegal on staff.  No benefits.  No taxes.  No overhead. And I only need to pay them when I actually use them.  The frequency of these offers, and the fact that many law firms are seriously considering them, represent a tectonic shift in the practice of law. It is one, of several possible outgrowths of the commoditization of the practice of law.  There are other options.

Deep in the midst of a CAPSAuthor Conversion and a HotDocs template rebuild, I had a chance to reengage with Word Styles.  I was explaining to my client that part of the rebuild involved the creation of a custom styles template for their entire suite of documents.  In one instance, when the client pointed to a visual discrepancy to some paragraph, I opened the template and assigned the paragraph to a different paragraph style.  In another instance, I opened the stylesheet, changed a style definition,and then pushed out the new definition to 20 templates.  What would have been an hour or so of work to edit the templates, or 15 minutes cleanup on every assembly, was eliminated in under a minute.

A recent series of posts on Technolawyer, titled “Legal Software and Consultants” troubled me.  In this series, Mark Deal, Ay Uaxe, and Jason Havens spared on the role of legal consultants in implementing case management solutions. There was a touch of resentment on both sides.  On one side, the lawyers (of whom I count myself), look to their extensive education, their extensive domain knowledge and work experience as qualifiers in the world of software design and process.  It should be “easy”; it should be “cheap”; and anyone can do this stuff; it’s not rocket science.  Why don’t those vendors understand?  Why don’t they anticipate and design for my needs. On the other side are the legal technology consultants who have spent years studying the software tools, designing solutions with the software, and implementing and training. Many serve in defacto advisory capacity to software vendors, fielding feature requests and reporting on bugs.