Peer to Peer Magazine

46 and coordinating their efforts. By bringing together a range of experts from different backgrounds, those newly formed vendors can look at the entire scope of a critical legal task—like drafting documents—and offer an end-to-end solution. Designers, working cooperatively, can create a unified interface that offers lawyers the essential tools they need to accomplish that task faster, better, and with less effort. Best of all, these integrated tools work seamlessly within the software and systems that lawyers already use, and they're supported by a single vendor that is fully equipped to resolve issues anywhere along the process. After all, lawyers don't need to start their practice over or learn how to do entirely different tasks: they still need to draft and review contracts and pleadings, collaborate with partners, and advise their clients. It's our job, as legal technolo companies, to leverage technolo so that lawyers can do those tasks more easily, freeing up their ener for higher-value work, minimizing wasted time, and providing faster turnarounds for clients. This collaborative consolidation is upending the market by bringing together former competitors and near-competitors from adjacent spaces, allowing each to focus on what it does best while using our collective knowledge to create comprehensive solutions. One example of how that approach has created a wraparound solution is the document drafting lifecycle. Using knowledge from experts at every stage in the legal drafting process, the overall lifecycle shepherds documents from creation and checking all the way through collaboration. How Consolidation Enables to a Wraparound Document Solution The traditional way of drafting legal documents considered the various stages of document creation, checking, and collaboration as standalone tasks. Legal professionals needed to use different programs for each stage, leading to translation errors, formatting inconsistencies, and wasted time and effort. And vendors were part of the problem: by looking at each task in isolation, we failed to account for how lawyers needed to iteratively cycle documents through the various stages of the process. It took consolidating with other experts—companies with diverse skill sets and approaches to document drafting—for us to coordinate our approach to the broader problem of generating beautiful documents. That process flows through three stages. Creation: Producing Better First Drafts Under the old model, lawyers face a conundrum every time they sit down to create a new document. Unless they start from scratch each time, they must choose which template or previous model document to begin with. Then they must confirm—if they can—that the chosen document is a final version, incorporating everything they've learned from their previous experiences. For complex documents like contracts, attorneys must ask whether a contract contains all the clauses this new client needs or omits important areas because they weren't relevant to the last client. Finally, lawyers must ensure that this new document is formatted consistently with other documents and presented in the right style to reflect well on the overall firm or practice. Checking: Identifying and Correcting All Errors and Weaknesses Once a document has been created, formatted, and customized to a particular client and issue, it must be checked and corrected. Unfortunately, reviewing and proofreading are among the most laborious and unrewarding tasks in the practice of law. In fact, we've learned from talking with customers that 65% of legal professionals face too much time pressure when it comes to drafting and reviewing their documents. One in three admits that the time pressure is so intense that they simply don't proofread. To make matters worse, as many as 15 percent Paul Domnick Paul Domnick is President of Litera Microsystems, having been President of Litéra Corp from 2014 to 2017. He brings unique insight into the utility of the Litera Microsystems' risk management solutions having previously been CIO of Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer for five years. 65% of legal professionals face too much time pressure when it comes to drafting and reviewing their documents.

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