Digital White Papers

40 WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT Developing a Document Assembly Platform That Works » Junior aorney time allocated to editing our standard forms or precedents for new clients could be diverted to higher-level work, like beer understanding the client, the fund's structure and the legal and regulatory framework underpinning the language in the documents. » We hoped to improve our junior aorneys' career satisfaction by freeing them from lower-level mechanical draing to focus on higher-level substantive draing. In short, our goal was to maximize the value of our services to our clients by draing beer documents more quickly and cost-effectively while making our aorneys smarter and happier. To do this, SRZ built an investment fund document assembly platform using HotDocs, which enables our aorneys to dra a full suite of high-quality private fund documents efficiently. Pros and Cons of Document Assembly Document assembly refers to technology solutions that dra (or assemble) word-processed or PDF documents based on predetermined logic. Intuit's Turbo Tax is a well-known consumer-facing document assembly product. Document assembly is not new (HotDocs, for instance, launched in 1996), but its adoption by the legal profession has been uneven due to significant hurdles, including billable hours, commoditization, cost, labor shortage, lost training and document suitability. Fortunately, these hurdles can be overcome. Billable Hours: Some aorneys perceive document assembly as damaging to a law firm's boom line because it allows quicker document draing, reducing the amount of billable hours and revenue. For some practices, though, reduced hours might be helpful if they are facing pricing pressure from the competition. A reduction in hours may also result in fewer write-offs and improve profitability. Document assembly can also give junior aorneys the tools to perform more substantive legal work earlier in their careers, resulting in greater value-per-hour for clients. Commoditization: Document assembly raises the specter of commoditizing a legal service by causing prices to drop, competition to increase and margins to narrow, but this outcome is not inevitable. If a lawyer needs 100 hours to negotiate and dra a suite of documents, reducing the effort by 10 or 20 percent will not commoditize the practice. It will make it more competitive. Cost: Implementing a document assembly platform requires a substantial investment in both technology and people resources, including experienced programmers and partner and senior associate legal subject-maer experts. Increased revenue can offset these costs. Labor Shortage: While consultants specializing in document assembly programming are fairly easy to come by, experienced aorneys able to think programmatically and collaborate effectively with these consultants are not as easily found. Staffing these aorneys on form and template development projects is difficult when client demands take priority. Firms with practice support lawyers (PSLs) can appoint them to manage these projects, knowing they are free of client pressure. For firms without PSLs, finding the right resource can be challenging but not impossible. Our goal was to have a form created by document automation that is 80 to 90 percent complete, leaving 10 to 20 percent to be custom drafted based on our precedents.

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