Document Assembly & Case Management Blog

The goal in document assembly is to “model” the transaction.  A Canadian attorney once explained to me, we don’t have forms and templates, we have document models, which contains structures and details.  Viewed from this perspective, the goal in template development is to build a better model of the ultimate transaction. The result is that negotiations are quicker, and more focused on concepts as opposed to crafty language.

Document assembly projects are subject to the 80/20 rule ... the final 20% takes 80% of the time.  And for that reason, many projects don’t get perfected.  When a system is for internal use, the benefits of automation are good enough; but when turned into an saleable application, or a client-focused application, much more is required.  This blog focuses on techniques for working with the template to reduce the time to get from 80 to 100%.

Is it the process or the document that comes first?  Does the user view the world as a series of data, with document as the outputs; or a series of documents, with data as the inputs.  These views govern how you will design a document assembly library.

Part of a continuing series on applications of Document Assembly at a Wall Street law firm.  This blogs deals with the application of document assembly to a practice specializing in Asset Securitization.

Working with template systems (as opposed to individual templates) requires attention to detail and planning before execution.  The rewards of planning come from ease of maintenance, and flexibility to change.  The blog looks at formatting and design questions in Document Assembly system.

This Blog addresses the use of document assembly in the Corporate Law Department of a large firm.  It explore the type of documents in such a department that might be amenable to automation. 

A few recent posters to the HotDocs list have suggested it was not “best practices” to use computation in the INTERVIEW computation; that is was best to use a series of ASK statements, surrounded by IF EXPRESSIONS to guide the interview. This Blog add looks into Best Practices for creating a document-scope INTERVIEW computation in HotDocs

I have been asked recently to prepare a White Paper on Document Assembly as applied to a large Wall Street law firm, with a sophisticated and diverse corporate practice. This article will launch a series of articles that will take you through a law firm, department by department and identify those areas that are ripe for automation.

How does one explain to a web developer that document assembly is more than just throwing up some web-forms with fields tied an SQL database?  Sometimes, the hard way, by letting them try it themselves ...

Irrelevant answered variables in HotDocs can have their consequence.  This blog notes the problem, its consequences and some solutions.