Document Assembly & Case Management Blog

Lawyers deal with risk every day.  Whether responding to a summons and complaint, drafting an estate plan, or structuring a limited partnership, lawyers are called on to identify the areas of risk and resolve them.  Because most lawyers lack formal actuarial training, few lawyers can quantify the actual level of risk in a given situation, or the exact degree to which their actions and advice reduce that level of risk.  And yet, “risk reduction” is the main reason businesses and individuals hire lawyers. This articles explores the nature of risk, how lawyers assess risk, and how they can profit from doing a proper risk assessment.

This October finds me on the road.

For better or worse, the future of document assembly is on the Web. The web offers cheaper maintenance, quicker updates, and a more consistent look and feel. The web is also the most cost-effective on total cost of ownership ("TCO").  The catch is that startup costs are much greater for web deployment of automated templates.  Particularly since most law firms wish to “dip before they dunk”, the presence of desktop or networked document assembly solutions is critical to the development of automated content.  In the past five years, millions of dollars have been invested in innovative web-delivery of automated document creation systems.  By contrast, the investment in client/server based document assembly software has been minimal.

Over the past decade, document assembly systems have come and gone.  Some, like HotDocs 4.2, HotDocs 5.x, CAPSAuthor, WinCAPS, SmartWords, Agility, FastDraft, Form Bank, MasterDraft, MillRace, NovaDocs, PowerTXT, Scrivener, ThinkDocs, and WorkForm, are no longer supported.  Some like GhostFill, ProDoc, WinDraft, and Perfectus have only a small developer community that provides limited support. Others, like WordVBA and Wordperfect have macros tools that require dedicated technicians to support and maintain. Yet other systems, like Pathagoras, D3 and qShift lack support for traditional programming techniques like repeat loops, nested IF statements, and variable scripting.

The result is that thousands of legal templates are locked in poorly supported legacy systems, representing hundreds of thousands of hours of programming and invaluable legal workproduct.  This article explores a process of identify and extracting the business rules and workproduct from these legacy systems and moving them to more powerful and better support platforms such as HotDocs or DealBuilder.

There is much talk about the “Holy Grail” in document assembly.  As those who have seen “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” or more serious students of the Arthurian Romance (as opposed to those who have read “The DaVinci Code”, the Holy Grail is a “chalice” or “cup” which held the blood of the real Christ, was kept as a holy relic by the church for centuries and then was lost to history.  During the middle ages, knights went on quests to “find” and “recover” the Grail.  The Grail was never found.  But the “search for the Grail” filled up thousands of pages of literature, and the hunt for the Grail kept thousands of knights diverted in a quest that kept them from seeking to overthrow corrupt monarchies.

In the world of document assembly, one vendor has claimed to have achieved “the Holy Grail”.  The technology will not be available till late in 2007.  When it is, we will review it.  The question is not whether the Grail can be found, but whether it will be the “solution”.

For the past several years I have been running a virtual office with collaborators in multiple locations.  We have tried a number of collaboration tools, including GoToMeeting and GoToMyPC, Groove, Time Matters World, with mixed success.  Most of the work was project based, where control of the project files could be passed (as a football) from one collaborator to another.  This works as long as you can pass control.  However, there are times when we have needed to have simultaneous control of a project.  For those, we have now standardized on a Wiki.

The Following Article was Originally published in Technolawyer. You may have heard the radio ads for “GoTo…”. A businessman forgets a key file at the office and saves a long trip back to the office (and a lost sale) thanks to this miraculous service called “GoToMyPC”.  However, there is much more to “GoTo” than remote file access. “GoTo…” is a suite of online products and services from Citrix Online that is built around a core “secure desktop sharing” technology.  This review will look at the core technology and then evaluate each of the products, looking specifically at where they would fit into the practice of a busy lawyer.

I gave the following presentation in Sydney, Australia at a conference sponsored by Simon Lewis on the future of Document Assembly.  In this conference I spoke about the opportunities and barriers to entry for document assembly in the legal marketplace.

AS IT APPEARED IN TECHNOLAWYER:

Buying a new pair of shoes is fairly simple — you pick out styles you like, try them on, and go with the pair that fits and looks best. But picking out shoes and picking out a document assembly program are two entirely different animals. In this article, technology consultant and HotDocs expert Seth Rowland takes the guesswork out of your search and arms you with all you need to know about the newest edition of LexisNexis’ popular document assembly software — HotDocs 2006. Seth gives you the lowdown on the pros and cons as well as his wish list for future editions. Whether you’re new to document assembly or an experienced coder, we think you’ll find Seth’s exhaustive review helpful in your evaluation process. This article contains 2,753 words.

Darryl Mountain (Ontago, Inc.) recently submitted a scholarly piece to the International Journal of Law and Information Technology, titled “Disrupting conventional law firm business models using document assembly”.  In this piece, Mountain looks at document assembly software programs: dealbuilder, ghostfill, and hotdocs (to name a few) in the context of how they are, and will be shaping the practice of law—worldwide. To users of document automation, his conclusions will not be surprising.  However, to those on the fence, or to those trying to convinces others to get off the fence, this should be good reading.  CLICK to read article