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.