Document Assembly & Case Management Blog

When you think “document assembly” for law firms, who do you think of?  For many years, there has been a single answer, HotDocs.  This is not because of any great marketing effort by LexisNexis (the former owners of HotDocs). Rather, it was a combination of “automated forms” delivered by LexisNexis and a grass-roots movement of lawyers and consultants building systems from the ground up with a “cheap” software tool.  It was word of mouth that caused the spread of HotDocs, one license at a time.  Now that HotDocs is “established”, who are the contenders.  I was given the following list of contenders: ActiveDocs, Business Integrity/Dealbuilder, Epoq/Rapidocs, Exari, Korbitec/GhostFill, Napersoft, Pathagoras, SoftPowerHouse/PowerReuse, Thunderhead, and Zumesoft.  It is interesting that despite my 15 years in the business, this list failed to include some interesting contender, but also included some contenders, I had never heard of.  So, who are these contenders?

Early Days of Automobiles
In the early days of the auto industry, a team of mechanics would put together a car in a week.  This was no mean feat of engineering.  In many cases, the car would have “custom parts”.  There would be “user” preferences.  And there was the inevitable unintended variation.  To achieve efficiencies (and thereby profits which was the ultimate goal), the engineers would create a template (a master design) with instructions to be “manually” completed by the engineers.  Further efficiencies were achieved by laying out he workspace; adding labeled shelves with all the key auto parts.  Some items were “pre-assembled” or partially assembled, leaving a few remaining steps that could be used for customization.  Nevertheless, it required a team of skilled engineers to put together a car.  Quality control was a matter of “experience” and not something that could be measured.  Each car had a unique character.  And of course, cars were expensive; in fact, too expensive for most people to afford.

Every other year I assess our firm’s web-presence and look at the state of technology.  My goal is to build a website that is informative, describes the products we support, and gives useful comparative and illustrative information about those products. Two years ago my interests were wide ranging, but the core of our business was HotDocs, GhostFill and Time Matters.  Since that time, our skill set and product offerings have expanded, as well as our staff.  We now have significant programming and database management capabilities by virtue of the inclusion of Steve Stockstill and Marc Wexler in our virtual offerings, and have engaged our partner Holly Humphreys in several billing engagements. 

We have entered into the web-development business with a new offering coming out in the 4th quarter through our partner businesswebsitedesigners.com.au that addresses the needs of lawyers interested in both social media and document automation. We have diversified our offerings of practice management solutions to include AdvologixPM and Amicus Attorney Premium Edition.  We have built solutions with Exari document assembly and DealBuilder, now offered on a SaaS model as ContractExpress.  And we have partnered with NetDocuments to provide cloud-based document management.  And so, our website, as comprehensive as it is, is hopelessly out of date.

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.

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.

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.