Documents are the lifeblood of a law practice. The preparation of motions, appeals, forms, agreements, contracts, probate forms, civil litigation filings, and thousands of other legal documents exact countless hours of effort on the part of attorneys and legal staff each year.
Law teams constantly draft and change matter-specific documents, often starting with a similar document from another client file, and using a copy/edit process to change pertinent details to match the case at hand. This approach is known to be used in many practice areas.
The manual process is slow, tedious, and error-prone. Errors in legal documents are embarrassing at best, and at worst may result in malpractice charges or even disbarment.
Usually packaged as part of a practice management system, legal document automation software – also called document assembly – software has been around for well over 20 years, and is in use in many document-intensive industries, including banking, insurance, manufacturing, and legal. Are attorneys and paralegals at your firm still using a manual document creation process? If so, it’s time to consider document automation as a way to improve efficiency and profitability.
What is legal document automation?
The technology behind legal document automation software keeps advancing, but at its core, document automation is the process of taking the documents and forms you use every day and converting them into dynamic templates that can be used in the future to create and prepare new documents. Legal document automation software guides the user who is creating the document through an interview in order to input the crucial information for populating the variables in the templates.
Document templates eliminate the errors that come from cutting and pasting. Each field, signature block, or caption can be populated instantly and accurately from a database of information specific to the client and case, generating ready-to-print documents with simple filling-in-the-blanks and mouse clicks. To address the huge number of standard forms in various practices and jurisdictions, solutions like HotDocs by Caret give firms a head start with thousands of templates from legal publishers and state bar associations. When you integrate document automation with your legal practice management software, you save even more time on document creation, billing, and even discovery requests. Document automation simplifies legal billing and makes sure that everyone in your law firm is on the same page.
Benefits of legal document automation for lawyers
Improved compliance
Defined templates in document automation tools allow firms to closely adhere to approved business rules set by internal or industry authorities. Enable template version control to ensure all users or systems that produce documents use the latest, most compliant version. Many firms have rigid style guides governing standardization to ensure that all assembled documents comply with internal brand guidelines including paper size, fonts, margins, spacing, printing and binding, and other standards.
Enhanced customer service
Today’s clients are technologically savvy and will be more likely to engage with a firm that offers self-service. Document automation demonstrates that your firm is savvy, too. Rapid delivery is something clients increasingly expect and demand. An easy-to-use process that involves the client provides a better experience and improves client loyalty.
Time savings
Improve productivity by speeding up the document creation process by automating repetitive work. Using traditional copy/paste/edit methods to create new documents takes, on average, three hours.
Improve document accuracy
The use of well-designed templates speeds up the process of document creation and helps lawyers ensure their documents are compliant and contain the correct details. Manual documents created using HotDocs are completed in fifteen minutes and are 100% accurate.
Reduced risk
In the end, legally and technically accurate work is the goal. Legal technology is advancing legal workflow management, and document management is a proven solution. Legal document automation helps eliminate human errors that can creep into manual processes while reducing wasted time and associated costs, protecting your firm against legal issues stemming from inaccurate, non-compliant content.
Our powerful legal practice management software integrates with HotDocs; the market-leading provider of document automation software with more than one million end users in over 11,000 client companies globally.
Why choose Caret Legal for legal document automation
See how organizations are leveraging document automation and legal practice management software to increase efficiency, reduce risk, and eliminate errors. Designed for attorneys by attorneys, our purpose-built legal practice management software that includes document automation capabilities can help your firm save time and money. It’s that simple. Check out a free demo today.
