Document Assembly & Case Management Blog

I posted the following topic on the Legal Innovation group on LinkedIn:  Is Nolo Press (www.nolo.com) an innovator, a “threat”, or just a nuisance? Nolo Press ( http://www.nolo.com/ ) started out as a counter-culture response to the high cost of lawyering for the “average Joe”. It has morphs from “legal kits” to online legal forms and rakes in tens of millions of dollars a year. I got some interesting responses that I thought worth posting here.

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.

This morning I received an email from mindspring.net offering outsourced legal services in India:  research, transactions, document coding, drafting services, all at prices that would be a fraction of the cost of having a paralegal on staff.  No benefits.  No taxes.  No overhead. And I only need to pay them when I actually use them.  The frequency of these offers, and the fact that many law firms are seriously considering them, represent a tectonic shift in the practice of law. It is one, of several possible outgrowths of the commoditization of the practice of law.  There are other options.

Deep in the midst of a CAPSAuthor Conversion and a HotDocs template rebuild, I had a chance to reengage with Word Styles.  I was explaining to my client that part of the rebuild involved the creation of a custom styles template for their entire suite of documents.  In one instance, when the client pointed to a visual discrepancy to some paragraph, I opened the template and assigned the paragraph to a different paragraph style.  In another instance, I opened the stylesheet, changed a style definition,and then pushed out the new definition to 20 templates.  What would have been an hour or so of work to edit the templates, or 15 minutes cleanup on every assembly, was eliminated in under a minute.

A recent series of posts on Technolawyer, titled “Legal Software and Consultants” troubled me.  In this series, Mark Deal, Ay Uaxe, and Jason Havens spared on the role of legal consultants in implementing case management solutions. There was a touch of resentment on both sides.  On one side, the lawyers (of whom I count myself), look to their extensive education, their extensive domain knowledge and work experience as qualifiers in the world of software design and process.  It should be “easy”; it should be “cheap”; and anyone can do this stuff; it’s not rocket science.  Why don’t those vendors understand?  Why don’t they anticipate and design for my needs. On the other side are the legal technology consultants who have spent years studying the software tools, designing solutions with the software, and implementing and training. Many serve in defacto advisory capacity to software vendors, fielding feature requests and reporting on bugs.

Over the years of working with HotDocs we have encountered many issues with the basic design of HotDocs, client requests and what not, that have required creative solutions.  And in so doing, we have changed our approach from one that centered around “documents” to one that centers around data and workflow.  In so doing, we have substantially changed the way that we code in HotDocs, using methods and approaches that arise from other coding languages and programming principals.  We have found HotDocs to be flexible and powerful enough to support, for example, the use of common elements across multiple templates, use of templates as reusable objects, using local and global variables, internal databases, and dynamic indexing and cross-references.  Such features are not required for basic template design.  However, there use leads to more user-friendly interviews, more dynamic data entry, and the ability to design templates and interviews that reflect and respond to the data input.

A new frugality is sweeping the country.  It is posed as a movement towards thrift, a response to the downturn in the economy. But I want to posit that it is a movement towards self-reliance and an assertion of control over one’s fate.  If one can no longer rely on the big law firm or the big corporation for sustenance; if one can no longer rely on appreciating home values; if one can no longer on growing 401(k) plans; then one must rely on oneself.  And so as I prepare the beds for my vegetable and flower gardens, I think about the implications of this movement.

Over the past week, I have dabbled my toes in the world of social networking.  I have not yet activated my facebook profile (bashasys) or sought my “friends”, but I have looked as some of the more narrow market social networking tools.  The problems is that many of the tools are TOO open.  That means lotsa people to follow, lotsa posts to sift through, and oodles of time to waste. For that reason, my recent discovery of “groups” in a number of these sites heralds a change in my opinion of them.

A few days ago I decided to check out the new enhanced Group Management tools at LinkedIn.  A year ago, I put up my CV on LinkedIn.  Over time, I have dutifully built my network, making occasional invites, and accepting other invites. I set up a group for HotDocs Wizards --LinkedIn Group: HotDocs Wizards about a month or two ago.  Out of the blue, we actually got two job postings.  Just a few days ago, I started up The Virtual Lawyer—LinkedIn Group: The Virtual Lawyer and this time I was able to see the potential of LinkedIn.

As part of the HotDocs Wizards group on Linked in, I have now made my blog, Document Assembly (and Case Management) available on Linked In.  For those who don’t know about LinkedIn groups, the HotDocs Wizards group is a place where REAL HotDocs developers can meet to share ideas and even business prospected.  In the past two weeks, I have been asked to post two job offerings to the group.  It may be that is only a trickle, but enough trickles turn into streams, and streams feed into rivers.