Document Assembly & Case Management Blog

I have never been more optimistic about the future of document assembly than today. After years of retrenchment and stagnation, the market is full of new energy and ferment.  HotDocs is under new management, but it is not clear what direction it will be taking.  On the desktop, XpressDox has been launched by key developers formerly of Korbitec, developers of GhostFill. At $150/user, a free full-functioning trial downloads, a full powered syntax markup that requires NO component file and automatically determines relevance, there is some real new energy on the desktop level. 

On the server level, it is even more exciting.  Most document assembly server systems started at $25,000 and then went up into the statosphere.  At those prices, document assembly servers were the exclusive domain of large corporations and large firms, or used as publishing platforms.  The software, from Exari, Business-Integrity, and LexisNexis was very powerful, but often required, in addition to cost extensive domain knowledge in configuring and hardening a web-server, beefy hardware requirement, and large bandwidth.  Changes in management at HotDocs and Exari, as well as changes in direction at Business-Integrity could soon change that equation. 

The first out of the gate with a solution for the “uncommon attorney” and little guy is Business Integrity.  It has taken its powerful DealBuilder document assembly and relevance engine and rebranded, repackaged, and re-engineered it to function in the CLOUD on a hosted SAAS basis.  With the release of ContractExpress this week, Business Integrity, has thrown down the gauntlet.  For $195/month per user, you can now have world-class document assembly on the web.  And, if you have never seen ContractExpress in action, it redefines document assembly in power and ease of use.

D3 from Microsystems has flown under the radar for years.  I mentioned it in a Technolawyer review of document assembly products several years ago.  It was a powerful “clause-based” system that enabled and integrated well with advanced Microsoft products, included Exchange Server and SQL Server.  It was sold by Microsystems out of Chicago and was popular with large firms looking to extend the power of macro-suite products without leaving the Microsoft environment.  The product was in fact embedded in a task panel in Microsoft Word.  Well, as you can see in the release below, copied from the Microsystems web-site, a recent change in MS Word has rendered the product inoperable, and Microsystems is withdrawing D3 from the market.  The reason, custom XML tags that a recent Microsoft product change (required by an anti-trust settlement with the European Union regulators) removed from the product, on which D3 depends.  This is not the first time that changed by a word-processing vendor caused document assembly products to “die”.  WordPerfect was notorious in earlier versions from regularly updating its macro language, rending macro-based suites based on one version inoperable on upgrade.

As Published in TechnoLawyer on October 6, 2009: You’ve heard of document assembly, and you’ve heard of cloud computing (Software as a Service). And maybe you’ve even heard about Web-based document assembly tools. But what about document assembly in your own private cloud? That’s what Exari offers law firms that want an on-site solution with minimal software setup. How well does Exari work? Read document assembly expert Seth Rowland’s exhaustive review in this TechnoFeature to find out. Seth doesn’t just review Exari, but he also explains how to calculate the return on investment for your firm. This article contains 2,149 words.

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.

I have recently noticed a number of attorneys and software vendors getting “Twitter” personas ... see www.twitter.com. So I got one for myself.  I can be reached via @bashasys.  I had a long drive up to Montreal with time to kill on my new Blackberry Storm (Rose was driving).  And so I enrolled in Twitter and began to Twit (yes… that is a new verb that I cannot claim credit for). And here are some of my thoughts after a week of Twittering.

AS PUBLISHED IN TECHNOLAWYER : With the recent state of the economy, many companies are tightening their belt — and law firms are no exception. But sometimes you have to spend money to make money. According to legal technology consultant Seth Rowland, now is the time to redouble legal document automation initiatives. In this comprehensive two-part series, Seth explores document automation, first from a technology perspective, and then from a business case perspective. This week, Seth explains how to get started, constructing a bridge between mere templates to a full automation system. This article contains 1,684 words.

AS PUBLISHED IN TECHNOLAWYER: With the recent state of the economy, many companies are tightening their belt — and law firms are no exception. But sometimes you have to spend money to make money. According to legal technology consultant Seth Rowland, now is the time to redouble legal document automation initiatives. In this comprehensive two-part series, Seth explores document automation, first from a technology perspective, and then from a business case perspective. Published on November 25, 2008, Part 1 explained how to get started. Today in Part 2, Seth returns to discuss the Return on Investment ("ROI") for document automation initiatives. This article contains 1,929 words.

For the past few years, the world of document assembly and practice management as be S.O. (or same old ...).  There have been a number of interesting upgrades to existing products.  There have been some exits (notably GhostFill).  There have been a few acquisitions (Lexis’s purchase of PCLaw and Juris, to name a few).  Into this “void” there are 3 new players who I will be examiniing: Zunesoft (maker of WordFusion, a document assembly platform), RocketMatter (www.rocketmatter.com) - a cloud-based legal practice management system- and Clio (www.goclio.com) - another cloud-based practice management system.

As a document assembly consultant, I am often contacted by solo or small attorney firms who are overloaded with work, champing at the bit to get a Document Assembly system, realize the value but are understandably nervous at the cost. And, they should be. Creation of a good document assembly system is expensive in both time and money. Your law school education wasn’t cheap, setting up your office wasn’t cheap and setting up a potential profit generating document assembly system that will become absolutely integral to your practice won’t be cheap either.

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.