Assembling your future - Legal Week

Document assembly is vital to every law firm's future. Instead of producing precedents in a traditional manner, precedents can be 'programmed' into systems, allowing documents to be produced intelligently and efficiently. The user is then asked key questions, allowing documents to be created electronically in a fraction of the time.

Law firms need to invest in this area and quickly. Development standards, changing specifications, long testing periods and managing change all present real hurdles. This requires skilled project managers to keep things on track, break down barriers and ensure that costly action is not confused with progress. IT personnel and fee earners need to work side by side and each will need help and support to get the most out of the system. Process documentation containing examples and development templates can soften the incline of a learning curve and deliver consistency between systems.

The system we use, HotDocs, still dominates the market, but new players such as Ghostfill, Speedlegal, Knowhow Systems and Business Integrity are gaining recognition. Unless legal publishers make law firms an offer they cannot refuse by developing these products in the future, cost and quality benefits will force firms to become engaged in development. In the near future, third-party government information sources will automatically feed into such systems, while voice recognition and clients entering data via the web provide other catalysts for change.

Cynics may say 'traditional' methods are best. But the demonstrable efficiency savings of a timed trial - proving that HotDocs produces documents in a third of the time of these traditional methods - cannot be ignored. Nor will clients ignore efficiencies like this in their choice of advisers. Law firms do not have a choice - quality and efficiencies guarantee that document assembly is a fact of the future.

Derek Southall is head of strategic development at Wragge & Co. LLP

The lawyer's view

The legal profession has finally moved on from having documents hand-written by an unfortunate clerk. Yet document production remains amazingly old fashioned - most lawyers still produce a document by printing relevant precedents, amending them by hand, then asking their secretary to produce a draft, requiring laborious proof reading.

But now document assembly software promises to be the best thing to hit the profession since the typewriter. Properly set up, it can create substantial savings in chargeable time and it can produce complex draft documents more quickly. It also rapidly generates suites of standardised documents for use in volume transactions or major projects. This means senior lawyers can focus their expensive, chargeable minds on complex transactional areas, leaving much document production to more junior staff.

As the e-conveyancing envisaged by the Land Registration Bill approaches realisation, IT systems that allow firms to 'computerise' much of the conveyancing process will be essential. Technologically-aware clients, for example, could provide instructions in a form directly compatible with the software.

Take the production of a draft institutional lease. Most firms will have many precedents, covering everything from warehouses to shopping centre units. At Wragge & Co we created one lease which has been coded for use with the HotDocs assembly software. By answering various straightforward questions on screen, a lease can be produced that contains only the drafting relevant to the particular property.

Similarly, we can create all the statutory forms, legal documents and standardised correspondence necessary to set up a shelf company or send out a batch of project documents by answering one set of questions, with the data then imported into each document.

Document assembly software makes a real difference to the speed and efficiency of transactions, giving clients a real win-win situation.

Greg Norton is a property lawyer at Wragge & Co. LLP

The professional support view

Document assembly technology enables drafting from precedents to be speeded up enormously. Professional Support Lawyers (PSLs), who are typically responsible for maintaining precedents, are essential to making the best use of this technology. They must restructure the documents and the working practices underlying them so that they are produced as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Setting up agreements in discrete sections, for example, allows bolt-ons such as parent company guarantees or complicated rent review provisions to be inserted and negotiated independently.

Optimising use of schedules and building documents as 'modules' of clauses makes this process even smoother. This can lead to significant improvements in the way documents are constructed and the PSL must then educate the firm's lawyers on how these changes affect them.

The technology also improves production of suites of similar documents, enabling them to be produced, maintained and updated easily. Corporate completions invariably involve notices, minutes and certified copies - if one of the directors is unable to attend a meeting, one change in our assembly system means that the correct name is inserted into all relevant documents, rather than each document having to be corrected individually. The system's ability to read data from other databases makes this facility even quicker.

The applications are not confined to lawyers in private practice - their clients now expect access to precedents or assistance with their own. And this is where real added value is possible.

If document assembly technology is routinely built into those documents, clients can use them more easily.

Sophisticated in-house legal teams are alive to the improvements in speed and quality that the technology promotes - not only do they expect their external lawyers to use the technology, but they want their in-house team to do so as well.

David Halliwell is head of professional support at Wragge & Co. LLP

The managing partner's view

The trouble with IT is that you have no choice. As Jack Welch, CEO of General Electric, put it, there will be those companies that embrace IT and there will be those that do not survive. Law firms are no exception.

Unfortunately, 'embracing IT' cannot be achieved by a one-off transaction. It is a relentless treadmill of expenditure that escalates year by year.

But the good news is that IT is an investment and an opportunity to improve productivity and gain competitive advantage - and document assembly provides one of the most striking demonstrations of how intelligent IT can bring about a competitive advantage. Consider some of the reasons why effective document assembly will drive clients in your direction:

• Clients choose firms with relevant experience and skills. They want to benefit from your past experience rather than help you up the learning curve. Document assembly enables us to capture - and capitalise on - our knowledge: the experience of one lawyer is reproduced by many.
• Likewise speed. Gone are the days of endless trawling through semi-relevant precedents. A relevant, tailored document can now be produced at jaw-dropping speed - drafting that took days now takes hours.
• So to quality and consistency. No more manuscript amendments and typos. Instead, at the press of a button, one is granted the ability to replace a single word or company name throughout a complete set of documents: the headline agreement, the funding documents, board minutes, service contracts and so on.

For Wragge & Co, the acid test is the 'more law per hour' principle: can we produce better quality documents more quickly using document assembly techniques? Very often we can. The consequence is increased production in each hour for which our client is paying us. Hence, more law per hour. Confirmation, if ever it was needed, that IT spending is an investment in producing value for clients - and not a cost

Quentin Poole is managing partner of Wragge & Co. LLP