White Paper

Document Assembly for the Law Firm

By Judye Carter Reynolds

When an attorney is creating work product, a document assembly product is in order. It’s the perfect tool to bring together information needed that is otherwise often stored in incongruent systems such as document management systems, other documents, and internet resource sites. Attorneys and legal staff need to leverage a firm's library of past work, while eliminating the frustrating tasks of endless cutting and pasting; and hunting for source documents.

Without a document assembly application, the law firm's clients are paying billable attorney hours to search for the information they need.  Therefore, a firm with a content rich document assembly application would definitely have a competitive advantage.

What Are The Hurdles To Document Assembly?

  • Knowing where the documents are and which content is relevant and appropriate.  Not knowing where the pertinent information is prevents appropriate content use.
  • The content is outdated.  When the content is not stored in a centralized location, much of the content is outdated and can't be used without much work.
  • The content is store in outdated systems.  The location of the content is known, but is stored in old and tired systems.

Key Elements to an Enterprise Based Document Assembly Application

An Enterprise Based Document Assembly Application (EDA) starts with the best parts of a firm’s current method of assembling documents.  EDA leverages a firm's library of past work and Microsoft Office, while eliminating the frustrating tasks of endless cutting and pasting; hunting for source documents.

EDA Rules for Content Reuse

  • Access to expert knowledge based content from a centralized store.
  • Microsoft Office (especially Word) should be a common denominator for content formatting and work product.
  • Centralized process for document creation and production.
  • The ability to save transaction-specific knowledge in a document model to prevent knowledge bottleneck that plagues so many law firms and that eliminates the need to find the resident expert.
  • The EDA must use the inherent capabilities of Microsoft Office in the form of formatting and outline numbering.  Microsoft Word’s native tools reduce the training curve, because users intuitively know how to use the EDA the moment they move the mouse.
  • Your EDA must use state-of-the-art security technologies, the same used for online banking applications.  This ensures the security of data over the Internet.

Expert System Knowledge Based Content Acquisition

How the firm captures the expert knowledge in the EDA is very important.  The expert knowledge base lies in the minds of attorneys, stored documents, and workflow processes that possess much of the content by default.  Acquiring this knowledge from all these disparate sources and placing it into the working models of the EDA should be straight forward and dynamic.

  • EDA allows a firm's experts to add centralized commentary, external resource references (from the web), and other pertinent information right in the EDA master model.  The information is always available even when the expert responsible for it isn’t.
  • A firm should be able adopt the EDA as required, attorney by attorney, practice group by practice group, office by office, or firm wide.
  • EDA should be available on demand, whenever or wherever.  This method of working is very different from the traditional proposition of making a large commitment to acquiring, installing, and rolling out enterprise software.
  • EDA should not have a large up-front capital investment in terms of people hours, resources, and money.
  • EDA should not force a firm to change the way it manages workflow or documents.
  • EDA must help a firm manage metadata risk.  EDA's centralized content storage minimizes Microsoft metadata in content, because the content isn’t based off old or reused documents.  The metadata is managed in a centralized store

EDA's Return on Investment

When your EDA is based on a centralized content store and Microsoft Office, this enables the firm to increase its return on investment.  ROI is more than the money invested in the technology and the resources deployed.  ROI should consist of user long term training investment, productivity gains because of the EDA, and mitigated migration costs when upgrading to new technologies.  Listed below are the gains a firm will have when deploying an effective EDA:

  • A firm's knowledge acquisition process is centralized.  The content is rich with commentary, external resource references (from the web), and other pertinent information that can be placed dynamically right into the EDA content at will.  The information is always available, thus reducing the time it takes an attorney to find the information that may be stored across the firm.
  • The user has access to content from anywhere and at anytime.  The content can be accessed from work, home or on the road in a hotel.
  • The tools deployed and made available to the user are familiar, thus lower the long-term cost of ownership.
  • The content is up to date and this improves client work product.
  • The EDA provides easy to use yet powerful formatting tools in the form of outline numbering and styles.  This creates better work product in a shorter amount of time implementing the firm’s best practices and standards for document formatting.
  • The content is context based, so the user doesn’t need to search for the content.  The work product is up to date and accurate.
  • The process is smooth and centralized for content examination and commentary.  This approach reduces costs and facilitates compliance with changing legal codes.

Conclusion

A firms using a smart EDA can save money in a organization for any practice setting-whether in private practice, government setting, or even an in-house legal department.  It can make any attorney immediately more productive.  An effective EDA's magic really starts working when its knowledge-management features are used to share knowledge among larger practice groups.  One attorney can take advantage of the experience, expertise, and content created by another.  With the built-in transaction knowledge content it represents, it is essentially a practice guide online, with the ability to create documents that adhere to a firm’s best practices in one place, thus improving ROI for the firm.

If you would like more information on Esquire Innovations's iCreateDA (document assembly application) or would like to schedule a LIVE on-line demo with a document assembly expert, please contact us at www.EsqInc.com.