Companies create documents all day, every day. For lawyers, it is slightly different, because documents are a large part of your work product - they are what lawyers actually do a lot of the time. Documents that may LOOK different because of the varying content that may be in them, but are in fact highly repetitive, but with many options and factors to be considered. For law firms especially, such documents are the core of your business.

In a meeting one day, the author of this page was met with disbelief upon stating:

"Many complex and semi-complex documents can be produced by a document assembly in their final forms - first draft"

This was not thought to be possible. Why not? In my experience, designing a system that is able to produce a majority of legal documents without post assembly editing is not impossible, it is just logic and reading enough documents to produce templates that take into account all the variations. It is difficult because of volume.

So why are we investing in document assembly again? There should only be a few possible answers...

Repercussions? That has negative connotations! Any document assembly project can yield good and bad results. "Bad" results from document assembly fall into two categories. The "poorly implemented document assembly" list, which includes such things as:

Time to discuss a dirty word: Billing. Filthy naughty billing. At least, its dirty when its discussed in the open but lets face it - it is the core of every legal firm regardless of size, ethos or approach.

The Bottom Line for Billing Structures and Document Assembly

Document assembly will ONLY help your bottom line under a "per hour" (traditional) billing model if one or more of the following apply to the area of practice you invest in...