Every time you draft a document manually, you are betting that today is your 'best drafting day, ever'.  Stastically, the chances of this being accurate are close to zero.  With document assembly, you compile your best drafted content into a system and re-use that 'best drafting' every day. And if, one day, you draft something better than your system, update the system with the better drafted content, new options, or whatever.  Drafting with document assembly truly makes every day your best drafting day.

Here are some other great reasons to spend the time and money necessary to build a quality document assembly system:

• Your firm regularly uses a flat-fee, scale or "value based" billing model. Reduction on time spent directly translates into less work for the same return.
  
• You wish to eliminate data re-entry within your firm - a piece of data is only ever entered and checked once per matter.
• You draft many documents day to day that are high volume, low profit such as debt recovery, property and mortgage, windings up, bankruptcies. You don't make much money per matter, but you do a lot of them. In this case, you are seeking to build a system that will allow you to produce at the very least 50% more than your current output, without staffing increases. Most likely you would also want to draft your system to handle multiple clients in that area of practice, so that a one click to specify the client for the matter makes a multitude of document & content selections for your users.
• You draft more than one or two low volume, high profit documents on a month by month basis. You don't do many of them, but when you do its at least a day of work to get it right. In this case you are after a complex system that produces one or two documents of a very complex nature in a "close to final" draft form. The aim is not to produce the document, but to produce it in such a way that your proofing and finalizing times are cut by a large margin. In this instance, it may also be better to look at specifically clause-based document assembly products.
• You wish to retain a loss leader area of practice, yet stop losing money on it (its only a loss leader because someone else can do it more efficiently...)
  
• You seek to reduce template creation and maintenance times, as you are constantly getting new clients (perhaps your in-house macro system is just painful to maintain?). You don't want a phone number or address change to require every single precedent be reviewed.
• You wish to standardize the formatting and styling of every document produced by your firm, since it sometimes seems as if every second lawyer & secretary has their own private "stash" of templates they work with, when your firm is striving for consistency.
• You wish to standardize the content and quality of your output, so that a paragraph requesting trust funds for stamp duty (for example) always uses the same language, regardless of the author.
• You wish to maintain only one version of generic e-stationery such as letterhead, memo headers and signing blocks, that is re-used by every other template in your firm.
  
• You want a means to centralize all template storage and access that isn't based on Explorer!
  
• You wish to reduce training times for new staff, so that new users only have to learn how to get around a library or two, instead of learning the location of every precedent, and getting used to several drafting styles and approaches.

These form the majority of reasons and benefits why you would invest in document assembly. Some of these reasons can be solved with simple in-house maintenance and procedures. Others can be set up with programs designed for that purpose (document management springs to mind...). Document assembly can provide solutions for all of these circumstances.