P2P

37 I L T A N E T . O R G The Players There are more than this, but the following is a short list of competing programs in this area: ActiveDocs, Aurora, (Bighand) Create, Docassemble, Docmosis, Docrio, Documate, Doxserá, Draftonce, Formstack Documents, Forte, HighQ (fka Contract Express), HotDocs, Innova, Lawyaw, Leaflet, PatternBuilder, Rapidocs, Templafy, TheFormTool Pro, Woodpecker, XpressDox, and ZumeForms. For any omissions, I apologize (there are new ones released seemingly monthly). To reiterate, I'm not evaluating any of them against others. My goal is to provide you with the information by which you can decide which of them would be the best fit for your office. These programs tend to improve over time, so if you looked at any of them in the past and were dissatisfied, you may be surprised at what the same platform is capable of today. When Document Automation is Appropriate Everything from simple letters to the most complex documents a firm could generate can be automated. The only types of documents which cannot be automated are those which are drafted from whole cloth using no existing language, clauses or forms. Of course, it's extraordinarily rare for a lawyer to employ such a process for drafting complex documents. I also find that many people believe that document automation only works well with simply documents which are repetitively produced. However, the opposite is true. DA platforms really shine (and provide quick return-on-investment) when they're used to generate extremely time-consuming documents which are frequently required. For example, an estate planning lawyer may often produce revocable trusts, and each one takes quite a bit of time to complete. In that case, DA can make a big impact. On the other hand, if a lawyer only needs to fill in blanks with simple forms, then the word processor may be all that is required and DA would be overkill. For example, Microsoft Word has many tools for basic automation including AutoText, macros, mail merge and content controls. Functional Selection Criteria As previously mentioned, I want to provide a list of functional criteria you can use to evaluate alternative programs. This is not a comprehensive list of every possible thing DA can do. Instead, these are what I view to be the most important considerations (listed in random order because what is very important for one lawyer may be irrelevant to another). For purposes of this discussion, I'm going to refer to any data input screen or interview involved in the assembly process as a "Questionnaire." S TAT I C O R D Y N A M I C Q U E S T I O N N A I R E Some platforms present a set of questions which cannot be changed or concealed, even if a question is irrelevant based upon how previous questions were answered. For simple documents, this may not be a problem. However, the more complex the decision tree involved, the better it is to have a dynamic interview that automatically changes and updates itself based upon how prior questions were answered. This reduces the margin for error and also makes it easier to combine similar documents into a single template. For example, if an estate planning lawyer has seven revocable trust templates (based upon fact-pattern variations), the objective should be to create a single automated revocable trust template which combines all seven variants. This makes ongoing administration of the system easier because there's only one template per type of instrument, and the common language is present only once. Imagine how confusing it would be to generate a trust from a system where you had to evaluate the relevance of every single question/input that might be necessary to generate any of seven different types of trusts.

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