All lawyers and law firms have one thing in common – their work involves creating multiple legal documents to ensure they run their mandate effectively. From legal documents, bills and invoices, letters, pleading, agreements, and motions, today’s legal professionals know how important it is to have document assembly software to help with document automation.
Automating document assembly processes maintains the brand outlook and ensures consistency. Most importantly, it reduces the time it takes to create contracts as you only need to make minimal changes to customize any document.
Types of Legal Entity Management Solutions
Before listing the solutions available, let’s define legal entity management. Legal entity management is a complex system that combines different facets of an organization. It’s a collection of an organization’s corporate records and structures, such as:
- Mergers & acquisitions
- Corporate names and legal structures
- Owners and directors
Entity management is a multi-department business function involving the following divisions of a company:
- Compliance
- Governance
- Legal
- Treasury, tax, and finance
- Human resources
Legal entity management aims to create a single source of truth to ease how businesses navigate and pivot as regulations evolve. Typically, a company’s legal and tax departments are charged with overseeing entity management.
There are six main types of entity management solutions, including:
- Company Secretarial Software – streamlines corporate record keeping and annual filings, enabling companies to comply with local regulations. It’s also an essential administration tool for officer and shareholder documentation and communication.
- Legal Document Management Software – allows legal professionals to digitize, store, organize, and easily access legal documents. It has scanning, imaging, and merging capabilities, which reduce document production and retrieval times, improve security, and maintain confidentiality by preventing unauthorized and controlling authorized access.
- Document Management Software – helps companies create, store, and share documents and allows one-to-one correspondence from standard forms and contracts. The tool eases document navigation and access thanks to its image capture, document search, and access management features.
- Board Management Software – provides a virtual space for the board to deliver on their mandate by allowing them to hold meetings and record minutes virtually as they share and review documents and vote on essential business affairs. It’s also a repository for documents that a board might need to execute its mandate.
- Compliance Software – tools that help organizations monitor, track and audit business processes to ensure they comply with relevant laws, regulations, and authorities. Compliance software is available for different industries, including tax and accounting or environmental compliance.
- Conflict Checking Software – is most commonly used by law firms to ensure the representation they offer clients has no conflict of interest with any of their other customers or cases.
What is Legal Document Assembly Software?
Legal document assembly software is a tool that automates the document creation process. It does so by generating different legal documents from intelligent templates. Regardless of the complexity of the document you need, this automation software enables users to create contracts in far less time than it would be using manual methods.
How does legal document assembly software work?
Legal document assembly software works by providing a rich functionality that allows word processing and contract creation within minutes. It does this by first creating a standard format of the most frequently produced documents in a law firm.
Through different complex functionalities, including mathematical computations and sophisticated logic, the software can swiftly edit these documents as the need arises with specific details to match the use of the document.
Simply, document assembly software allows you to change all the instances of variable text with accuracy as it prevents redundancy while decreasing the time it takes to create multiple complex documents.
What functions does document assembly software for lawyers perform?
Document assembly software takes over the process of drafting different types of contracts for lawyers. The tool automates the creation of pleadings, intake forms, and retainer agreements.
This software reduces the work of a lawyer to only creating the templates. The software then automatically populates the templates with relevant data by pulling the details from other systems or via a guided questionnaire.
What is field merge used by legal?
Field merge is one of the earliest forms of document assembly software. However, the technology has limitations that have seen it lose favor among the legal fraternity.
When it was released, it was used to generate basic documents such as envelope labels and letters by merging data in an Excel sheet with a Word document.
How does field merge work, and what are its functions?
Field merge works by replacing a variable in a document with the value you input. While it boots the speed at which you can create documents, the technology has its limitations.
It’s unable to generate complex documents whose input varies in language, syntax, and formatting. As a result, more law firms are switching from field merge to document assembly technology.
What are the differences between document assembly software for law firms VS. field merge?
The biggest difference between these two automation technologies is their functionality. Whereas file merge can only allow the population of a variable dataset with the inputted value, document assembly software uses complex logical and mathematical solutions, allowing users to use formatting, filters, and conditional logic statements to make complex changes and updates on documents.
The following are features of document assembly software that make it superior to field merge.
Conditional logic
This feature allows you to include or exclude text-based data depending on the value input. The typical syntax of conditional logic follows the pattern – IF-THEN-ELSE. So, for instance, for the question Is the CEO in?, the syntax would be: IF Question==” yes” THEN print “The CEO is in” ELSE print “The CEO is not in.”
The typical applications of this feature include:
- Pluralization – where you need to modify statements to signify pluralism or singular.
- Inclusion and exclusion of paragraphs – where you want certain references to be in specific documents and not others.
- Pronouns – to change the text to reflect the gender of the persons referenced.
Formatting
This feature allows you to format texts and create complex data sets such as lists and tables, change font styles into lower or upper case, bold, italics, or underlines, or add line breaks where necessary.
Filters
The last feature that makes data assembly software better than file merges, filters allow users to extract multiple similar records using set criteria. For instance, if you want to extract confirmed transactions from a template with both confirmed and pending ones, using the filter feature allows you to only get the data you need rather than the whole list.
Final Thoughts
Law firms often face pressure to produce multiple documents and contracts as a routine. In a world where producing more with fewer yields higher returns, legal document assembly software can’t be ignored.
Fortunately, automation technologies like file merge and document assembly software have made it much easier for legal professionals to draft documents in a fraction of the time than if they used traditional manual methods.
Still, not all automation technologies are built the same. Some, like field merge, have limitations that only allow them to conduct the most basic edits on documents. However, while the initial cost of document assembly software might be higher, the ability to automate complex functions makes up for the price. It allows law firms to create contracts faster, thus taking on more business and increasing the bottom line.
Investing in legal document automation software offers the best value for your money if you’re looking for a way to automate document assembly as a solo or multi-faceted law practice.
