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35 I L T A N E T . O R G M ost articles I have ever read about document automation cover specific software applications and discuss their relative strengths and weaknesses. However, I'm specifically not making recommendations about any products in this article. Document automation (hereafter referred to as "DA") software functionality spans a wide spectrum, and there are many competitors, with new ones appearing every year. I find that most people have heard of document automation understand vaguely that it helps one draft documents faster, and that's usually it. So first I'll briefly explain what DA systems are designed to do. Second (and most importantly), I want to provide a checklist of functional criteria to consider when evaluating options and comparing programs. Like most legal tech categories, there's no single DA product that is the best option for every situation (vendor claims to the contrary notwithstanding). If you are trying to figure this out for your practice, then I hope what follows helps make you a more informed consumer. It's an important decision and expensive to choose incorrectly. Finally, there's the issue of executing a project once you have chosen a platform, and I have some advice on how to get your project across the finish line. What I'm Not Discussing Here There are numerous subscription-based drafting systems available for many practice areas. With most of them, you answer questions on the computer and the system quickly generates documents for you. However, the subscription system is providing the content and documents you're generating. While you may be able to customize the underlying templates to some degree, and you can almost always tweak the documents once they are generated, the foundation of the system is someone else's language. By contrast, "pure" DA software requires that you provide the content because it is a simply tool for automating your own documents. In my experience, lawyers that try and reject subscription systems tend to do so because they just can't swallow the phraseology being imposed upon them by the system. Anyway, this article does not address subscription-based systems with pre-built content. There are also many matter/case management systems that offer various levels of DA functionality; and some even include content. However, those products exist primarily to solve practice management issues, and that's an article for another time. In this case, I'm focusing on pure DA platforms that do not offer packaged content or matter management capabilities (although many of them have links to matter management systems and some are actually owned by matter management companies). Problems With the Typical Drafting Method Lawyers often recycle old documents into new ones. In other words, they draft new documents by starting with an existing document from a previous matter or transaction. The existing document is found, renamed, and modified to work for the present engagement. While obviously better than starting from a blank page, this approach has significant drawbacks. Finding the document can be time consuming; and sometimes you never find what you're looking for. If you do find a similar existing document, the word processor's find-and-replace function rarely catches everything. It is also very easy to omit provisions or text missing from your original document. Even if you remember what to add, pulling text from other instruments or crafting new language is inherently slow. Another common error is leaving a provision in which should have been removed. How many times have you read an instrument containing language that seems completely

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