Digital White Papers

41 WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT Developing a Document Assembly Platform That Works Lost Training: Many senior aorneys believe that junior aorneys learn best by working through annotations and repeatedly editing form documents, and they worry that automated draing will deprive junior aorneys of rich learning opportunities. However, stringent proofreading becomes the learning opportunity. Whether legal documents are draed by hand or by automation, aorneys must review every annotation, understand the substance of each provision and make sure the end product is of the highest quality. Document assembly might do a beer job of training aorneys as their minds are less fatigued and more adept during proofreading. Document Suitability: Document assembly is appropriate only when there are few enough variables during information collection that the cost of entering data is significantly lower than the cost of draing by hand. In addition, all or most of the facts on which the draing will be based must be known at the outset, so highly negotiated documents are not well-suited for document assembly. Project Overview The first step in any document assembly project is creating the underlying form (or model) documents, which could be based on Microso Word or PDF files. When the forms are ready, they can be added to the document assembly platform by embedding variables using the program's code to create templates. Once the variables are coded in the templates, the front-end interview (or questionnaire) must be designed. Depending on the platform's complexity and development resources allocated to the project, this could take days, weeks or even years. Form Development Before work with the technology can begin, form documents must be built. Aorneys with advanced draing skills and partners with subject- maer expertise must allocate substantial time to this typically nonbillable work. SRZ's investment management group developed roughly 200 forms over the years, more than 40 of which serve as the foundation of our document assembly platform. Creating these forms required significant investments of time and collaboration among partners from six practice groups, making them multimillion-dollar knowledge assets. Because of this, all form documents are subject to copyright, enhanced security and usage monitoring to keep them from leaving the firm. We set out to capture the firm's collective knowledge in form documentation, but with limits: incorporating every possible term into a form would be cost-prohibitive and likely impossible. Therefore, our forms include only the most commonly used language and serve as bases for the requisite customized draing. To ensure that aorneys can find precedents for uncommon terms, the firm developed a proprietary fund database and knowledge bank. 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 draed based on our precedents as necessary. As the aorney lead on the project, I decided not to design by commiee to avoid bolenecks in the review process. We instead strategically solicited feedback from relevant experts and made iterative improvements. Aorneys are trained to take ownership of documents they dra; if our experts found language that could be improved, they reported it. We believe this process makes SRZ's forms the best fund documents in the industry. The basic elements of any document assembly platform are components, templates and interviews.

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