Digital White Papers

ANOTHER LOOK AT PRECEDENT MANAGEMENT While welcoming the tremendous potential of robust search tools, client portals and interactive matter dashboards, I continue to view precedents as a foundational component of an effective response to the mounting pressures of the competitive legal marketplace: deliver high-quality work faster and cheaper. How best to develop, maintain, deliver and maximize the value of up-todate precedents remains a continuing knowledge management challenge — one deserving closer examination, particularly in light of new technologies. THE NEW, OLD KID ON THE BLOCK: DOCUMENT ASSEMBLY Rethinking our firm's approach to precedent management began with a KM project to evaluate automated document assembly tools. Knowing the legal document assembly market had significantly evolved in recent years, from its initial nearly exclusive focus on lower-value commodity work to more sophisticated offerings, we wanted to reassess what role automated assembly might play in meeting the needs of our complex transactional practices. Faced with a plethora of product options, we enlisted the services of Marc Lauritsen of Capstone Practice Systems to help us navigate the waters. Capstone guided us in preparing a request for information (RFI) and in assessing myriad competing vendor claims and representations in order to make sure we were comparing apples to apples in a virtual fruit salad of features and functions. In addition to several RFI responses from the major players in legal document assembly, we received a submission from a company offering newerto-market contract analysis software. Focused on document assembly and following an initial assessment, we advanced two assembly products for second-round demonstrations with about 20 transactional attorneys. It quickly became clear that one size did not fit all needs, at least not at a firm engaged in a broad range of sophisticated transactional work like WilmerHale. Several attorneys were immediately attracted to the core capabilities of automated assembly: quickly generate high-quality first drafts by capturing key data points in a Q&A format; enter information once and have it automatically flow through a set of related documents; change a deal term at the eleventh hour; and generate a set of updated documents in minutes. Seeking to deliver high quality, competitively priced service as efficiently as possible, they immediately saw the value proposition of an automated assembly tool. But the love-at-first-sight reaction wasn't shared by all of the demo participants. While agreeing the software was impressive, several attorneys were skeptical that it would do much to ease their biggest pain points. Since these individuals were typically among our early tech-adopter crowd, we knew their reticence didn't spring from any general aversion to change. We dug deeper into the basis of their lukewarm enthusiasm and several themes emerged. First is the elephant in the document assembly room: Before you can automate, you must agree on a template form. Second, developing the form, in terms of time, effort and consensusbuilding, can be a significant hurdle, depending on the number of alternate terms and conditions and the complexity of the logic involved. Several attorneys also noted they find form documents of only marginal use in their work. With practices devoted to the sophisticated negotiation of highly specialized strategic agreements, little actual efficiency would be realized through the automatic generation of the first draft. For these attorneys, having easy access to a good collection of alternate clauses would be of far greater value. This feedback shone a spotlight on the reality that improving precedent management and document generation, particularly at firms with multiple

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