It is becoming increasingly difficult for small law firms to remain viable. Increased regulation, rising salary costs, increased competition, and commoditization is eroding margins. Even if only used in its most basic form, document automation has the highest return on investment of any law-firm software application because it saves time and increases accuracy. By choosing and implementing a solution that will grow as a firm’s needs evolve, it is possible to increase output without increasing costs.

 

What should you consider when it comes to choosing a document automation solution and implementing this for faster results?

Having helped hundreds of small and large firms in over 25 countries worldwide get more value and faster results with document automation solutions, we thought we should share some helpful hints and top tips for you and your firm.

 

Choose the right solution

Make sure that you choose a solution that has been around for at least ten years.

There are many document merge/ Choose assembly/automation solutions on the market today. Developing a document automation software system is difficult and it takes roughly ten years to establish a stable and flexible solution. The document automation industry is notorious for vendors coming and going, so firms that choose ‘young’ solutions often end up without any support when the vendor closes its doors.

 

Can the solution grow with you as you learn and as your needs change?

Many of the solutions on the market are basic ‘merge’ systems. These will become frustrating very quickly because as you learn about document automation, you will realize that you need a system that can do more than just the basics. It is therefore important to choose a solution that has been proven to meet the needs of small firms and large firms, so you have peace of mind that if your needs evolve, you won’t need to change solutions.

 

Get your firm ready to implement a solution

Establish some rules and a discipline about how you save data files and documents into a central (and preferably ‘cloud-based’) location that you and your team can access remotely.

• Have a centralized folder or area where completed documents and data files are saved.
• Don’t save files on local individual user drives – as this creates a challenge if someone is not at work or leaves the firm, or if their computer malfunctions and there are no backups.
• Define file saving and naming conventions for assembled documents and data files to make it easier to find them later. Some of the better document automation systems can automatically allocate filenames and folders based on answers captured by the user.

 

Invest in your and your team’s basic MS Word skills.

Most document automation systems use MS Word to output their documents. So, it is important to create templates with the correct paragraph numbering and styles, or you will find that your assembled documents will need to be corrected every time they are assembled, which wastes time.

 

Align as a team on the importance of implementing and using the solution.

Your firm will only benefit if the solution and templates are used. Even though a small firm may have appointed someone to create templates, other lawyers and secretaries often don’t use the templates. The first reason is that although everyone wants improvement, it is human to resist change. So, they prefer to simply continue cutting and pasting existing documents rather than learning how to use new system. The second reason users don’t adopt the new system is that lawyers invariably believe that their own agreements are best, so they reject a template that another lawyer designed. There are two possible solutions to this challenge:

 

Consult and be inclusive: The template developer should consult with the other lawyers and users for their opinion. This may slow down the template development, but the lawyers and users who are consulted will be much more likely to adopt a template if they were involved.

Adopt a mandatory approach to using the templates: The second method is less inclusive, where the managing partner or owner of the firm forces users to use the templates.

 

Fast track the implementation of your solution for quick results.

Choose the right documents to automate first. 

Identifying the most appropriate documents to automate first is important. Many firms make the mistake of choosing a very complex template to start with or a document that is easy to automate but is easy to draft manually – so it doesn’t save much time.

 

Make a list of five documents that you use regularly and are time-consuming to complete.

By automating these documents, you can get a more immediate return on your investment. Once you have carefully selected your documents, take time to work through each document to highlight all the content that will change based on different clients and scenarios. This will help you to understand how much work will be required on each document. From there, start with the document that requires the least automating. This will help you work through the software and create your first template relatively quickly.

 

Create a glossary of field names right from the start.

List the variable ‘field’ names that you are likely to use in most or all of your documents. This will help you ensure that these become standard across all your document templates so that you can re-use answers across documents. If you don’t do this from the start, the time and cost of having to go back after say a month of building document templates will waste time and be frustrating. Some document automation solutions allow you to add your glossary to the system, making field selection easier.

 

Apply these three template tips.

Have more than one template author in the firm.

Single practitioners and lawyers at small firms often build their own templates, which is a good idea because they are subject experts, and by creating templates themselves the knowledge of how to build templates stays with the firm. However, some firms appoint a single secretary to create templates, which is risky because if that person leaves the firm, the template library is often abandoned. So, it makes sense to train up a few people at the firm so that they can also develop templates to ensure continuity.

 

Consider subscribing to a template library.

Firms often invest time and energy creating their own templates even though there are some commercial options available. The advantage of a subscription template library is that the templates are accurate and are usually kept up to date. The reasons firms don’t always subscribe to these services are that they believe their own templates are better, or they believe that the dollar cost of a subscription is more expensive than their own time.

 

Don’t spend too much time making templates ‘perfect’.

A relatively experienced coder can create a basic template in 20 minutes but spend another two days to make it perfect! The thing is, it doesn’t need to be perfect. It simply needs to save you and your staff the time it takes to create a first draft of a document. It is OK to have some highlighted yellow text in your template that says ‘Delete this block if…’. Don’t forget the objective, which is to save drafting time. Besides, you can continuously refine and perfect the template later, once you are more experienced at coding.