Document Assembly & Case Management Blog

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.

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.

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.