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.

Apparently my experiment with Wordle did not change the results for HotDocs, XpressDocs, GhostFill, Time Matters, Amicus Attorney, and AdvologixPM. Perhaps, if I reorder the phrases HotDocs, XpressDocs, GhostFill, Time Matters, Amicus Attorney, and AdvologixPM so that they are alphabetical:  AdvologixPM, Amicus Attorney, DealBuilder, GhostFill, HotDocs, HoudiniESQ, Time Matters, XpressDocs.  Maybe if they are reverse alphabetical:  XpressDocs, Time Matters, HoudiniESQ, HotDocs, GhostFill, DealBuilder, Amicus Attorney, AdvologixPM, it will push me over. Alternatively, I can try them by word length:  Amicus Attorney, Time Matters, AdvologixPM, HoudiniESQ, GhostFill and HotDocs. 

It’s live!!!! The new Basha Systems legal technology news site. Come for a visit.  For TOO long, there was no source for news on developments in practice management and document assembly.  And yet, several vendors has started getting savvy about social marketing.  For example, Exari and ContractExpress have launched blogs and twitter feeds of news and development.  And so, rather than hunting everywhere for developments, I created a page for myself to track these latest “feeds” and then set it up for you to enjoy.  Come take a look; bookmark the site, and come back regularly.  If there are OTHER feeds you want to see, please suggest it.  Best of all, check out the new technology.  This is the first consultant website that you can “PERSONALIZE”. Yeah, you can reorder the feeds, change the priorities, and move it around to suit YOUR technology needs.

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.

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.

Another year has come and gone ... LegalTech New York ... The largest annual technology show.  Despite the emphasis on Litigation support systems, there were some notable participants at the conference presenting document assembly solutions.  HotDocs was there as part of LexisNexis’ Total Practice Management initiative; DealBuilder with it online document assembly system powered by a unique “relevance engine”; Perfectus Solutions with its browser-based IPManager document creation and delivery system; iXIO with its innovate online document modelling solution (Q-Shift); and Microsystems with its Word-ML basis document creation system (D3).

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.