In my time with HotDocs and GhostFill both in Australia and the United States, I have come across some statements or beliefs that were not only misguided, but caused massive misunderstanding of what document assembly can be, and what it should be.

If any of the titles of these articles match a thought that you have or have had in the past, you may wish to click the "read more" link. The rest of this article deals with a general warning regarding the sale of "bundled" suites of products. If you are considering buying a package that has more than one feature set (ie: case management, workflow, accounting, document assembly, document management), you should read the remainder of this article.

A Word of Caution

Some vendors will have you believe that you can buy a document assembly program, get "a couple of days of training" and be ready to program incredible systems that will save you hundreds of hours. Other vendors will have you believe that you can purchase their "off the shelf" precedent packages and that is document assembly - off the shelf form fill documents. Yet others will evangelize work flow and case management are far more important than mere document assembly, and that document assembly is ONLY useful when it is driven by a case management or workflow database. Sometimes, some of these statements are true.  Never are they all true simultaneously for a given client.

We have spoken with clients, in Australia and America, who either:

• have very erroneous visions of what document assembly is;
• have a document assembly product and (a few weeks later) cannot understand why its not as easy as it was made out to be; and
  
• are totally unaware that they have a document assembly program installed on their computer.

This last may appear difficult to believe: that a firm has document assembly software installed, yet is not even aware of it. However, there are vendors in the marketplace who have in the past put forward an accountancy/practice management/workflow/case management (some or all of these) solution that utilizes a document assembly product in the background (meaning the document assembly product sits "behind" a different interface while using data from a case management or workflow system).

In these cases, the vendor avoids mentioning the document assembly product, leaving the impression that it is the accountancy/practice management/workflow or case management system is actually producing these magnificent documents. In most of these systems, it is a database type application (as mentioned above) that users enter data into, which subsequently pushes out data to the document assembly program. In this type of situation, the client is unaware that:

• they have a document assembly program installed
• they are able to integrate their document assembly program with ANY ODBC compliant database (such as Outlook)
• the templates and coding that produce the documents are independent of the "solution" and can be modified to suit, sometimes without outsourcing expenses
• the data that comes from the "solution" can be massaged and manipulated on the fly (in both HotDocs and GhostFill) to fill out more answers, ask more questions and generally provide a far higher end product of document

The client is denied the ability to modify and work with their own system that should contain documents filled with their drafting styles and pleadings. I am not pointing fingers or making accusations, simply stating that this has happened in the past to clients I have dealt with and is something that should be avoided. To avoid this happening to you, ensure you have read Investment Checklists & Questions to Ask in the What Do You Want? sections of this site.