Before embarking on this approach, you should bear in mind what was covered in the "Organise our templates" article, as this is the foundation of any document assembly project:

You are seeking to mildly automate your precedents something along the lines of...

• Enable a user to make a copy of the template and fill in the blanks. Whatever option you choose will save all the "regular" data used to produce the document, such as parties to the matter, file number, signing author, dates and numeric amounts.
• Authors will still be lawyering fairly constantly, as many of your precedents will require a dictated body to the document, whether it be a pleading, optional clauses on a lease and the like.
• The user will then save the document as dictated, print it out, and hand it to a lawyer for proofing, and finalization.
• Documents may or may not be auto-saved by a macro or document management system, but either way are easily retrievable by file number or matter name.

In short, your firm wants a single set of precedents that perhaps do not do anything special, just an easily maintainable single set of precedents that can be managed centrally and updated efficiently. Very doable. More importantly, its doable economically and relatively quickly.

In this scenario, document assembly should not be expensive and will not likely consume vast monetary and staff resources (unless you have a precedent base of thousands of templates). Off the shelf precedent packages will (in many areas) suit your goals quite nicely. Court form packages can be purchased, which will produce appropriate headers, footers and signing clauses, and your lawyers can dictate the content of each document, to be finalized in the traditional manner. Property forms are also off the shelf and probably basic wills & estates type sets also.

Approach

Since you're not looking for whizbang document production lines, it may be beneficial to hire a consultant for a short period, but not critical. At this point, you have two options: purchase a document assembly platform or don't. If you do, the organization and programming of your documents will be far easier than achieving the same functionality within your native word processor. If you don't, it takes a fair amount of skill with VBA or WordPerfect's macro language to set up an equivalent system.

Our approach would be to:

• Go through the items outlined in the previous article "Organize our templates".
• Review the various document assembly products available. Get HotDocs, IdealDocs or Informs. Informs and IdealDocs are probably a quicker "up time" on the project, but will provide diminishing benefit as your staff get better at document assembly. HotDocs will have a slightly higher start up cost, but will provide more return in the long run, if you decide to ever build a complex system.
• Get trained in whatever product you chose - usually 1 or 2 days depending on the program chosen.
• Totally optional, but very valuable when you have quite a few areas of practice to be programmed: If you bought HotDocs, get a consultant to program a (small or complex) library for you. This will provide you with something to look at after your training - you will be able to refer to it for tricks and tips as to how your developer programmed to make the system work well.
• Program a library, test it & make it work. Possibly burn it to the ground and then rebuild it. Then get a day of advanced consultant training. All the theory and examples in the world are small replacement for real content in real systems that produce your documents. Additionally, having had to program a library and iron out all the wrinkles that pop up will give you a fantastic list of "How do I...?" (Warning: by the end of your first library, you will probably want to re-do it)

Please bear in mind that some of the items mentioned above are very brief in nature. The "Developer" section of this site deals with how to approach a document assembly project. That section expands on many of these items and concepts.

Benefits to this Approach

This type of approach to document assembly is usually quite easily managed in house, with little expenditure beyond the actual software you decide to use and some training. Your precedents should be sorted into areas of practice and reviewed as to currency and suitability. Using basic Word or WordPerfect functions, you can comment and annotate optional sections in the templates to provide "in-document" help text to assist a user creating a document.

And the best news: this can be done quickly and effectively by a single precedents co-ordinator, under the supervision of a lawyer (or lawyers) who will review and ratify precedents as being suitable for use or not. Additionally, should your firm ever decide to use document assembly to automate a given area of law within the firm, you have a very clear cut directory and template structure with which to commence development and already own the software to achieve your new goals.

Downside to this Approach

If you have areas of your practice that produce high volumes of documentation from day to day or highly complex documents that contain hundreds of optional clauses and wording, you are under utilising document assembly. You may not realize it, but you are losing money hand over fist. Not losing it per-se, but not earning it when it is readily available. Every time your professional staff repeatedly make a decision or dictate/type content in a letter, document or memo, they are losing money on something that could be programmed already.

Do we need urgent return of the Form 1 Transfer? Yes/No. If we do require urgent return, what is the deadline? Do we have trust funds to cover stamp duty? Yes/No. If yes, insert paragraph confirming sufficient funds are held. If no, insert paragraph stating the transfer cannot occur until funds are provided. This is a very basic question series from a letter to the client. If your professional staff are repeatedly making the same decisions over and over on each case (re-drafting content), they can make these decisions once, embed them in a system, and save time on every draft of that letter thereafter.

Another downside is that of the "purchased form set", programmed and sold by independent companies. They will work well for you when "starting out". They will produce (as advertised) the correct forms. However, they will usually contain nothing of your firm's intellectual property, limiting you to one of two options:

• Continually producing forms and documents in the system, then extensive post assembly edits to enter the "dictated" content (read: insert your intellectual property), then print, proof & finalize; or
• Spending serious amounts of time delving into the form set (if you are able), then programming additional functionality, which may or may not be supported by the vendor and which may or may not be replaced with the next forms update.

Off the shelf form sets will get you started, are definitely far cheaper than custom programming and will produce correct documents for filing and the like. There is however a large hump to be gotten over if you wish to take them further and start producing your finalized documents with the system. Sadly, it is usually far quicker and more cost effective in the long run to take the text from such forms, then re-build your data & programming from scratch.