While the legal industry is ever-changing, the need for accurate and compliant motions, agreements, and other documents is not. Nearly every critical task an attorney completes will require a document of some sort, from client intake to billing and beyond.
Unfortunately, drafting documents takes time. While you may be able to draft a letter in a few minutes, contracts and other detailed legal documents can take hours to create from scratch.
Luckily, the best document automation software for law firms allows you to automate the document creation process, saving you serious time and effort.
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Document automation and document assembly software (we’ll use these terms interchangeably) is a tool used to automate the creation and drafting of legal documents. These documents include everything from motions and contracts to general letters.
The best document automation software for law firms utilizes tools such as templates and capabilities like auto-population to generate legal forms and documents automatically. Some platforms use intelligent automation engines to pre-fill documents with information gathered from client interactions and intake.
Document automation software helps attorneys spend less time creating documents and more time on higher-value tasks. Plus, it ensures legal documents are as accurate as possible, preventing serious validity concerns and other consequences.
Although they’re often used together, document automation software and document management software are two very different things. Think of document automation and assembly software as what creates documents and document management software as what stores documents, making them findable and useful. Then there’s document comparison software, which is another thing altogether.
Explore the best Document Management Systems for law firms.
The most obvious benefit of law firm document assembly software is that it saves you time. With automation software, you’ll no longer need to create each legal document from scratch. This gives you more time to focus on tasks such as serving your clients and scaling your firm.
Time savings isn’t the only benefit resulting from utilizing document assembly tools. In addition, document assembly software:
Law firm document automation software offers a wide variety of features to help you create, edit, sign, share, and store all of your legal documents. Let’s dive into some of the key features you should look for when considering software.
The bread and butter of any document assembly software are the document templates. These templates help you develop documents quickly and easily, right inside the software.
Templates exist for a wide range of documents, including:
In most cases, templates are completely editable, allowing you to add or remove text as you see fit. And many platforms will also allow you to create your own legal templates that you can save and use over and over again.
Plus, they often include a simple search function you can use to find templates specific to your matter, location, and other factors.
A document library is simply a collection of legal templates you can use to generate new documents. Many platforms offer robust document libraries that include thousands of up-to-date, jurisdiction-specific public forms and documents. Of course, you can also save all of your own forms inside the library for easy access.
Law firms create numerous documents each day. Each one is slightly different due to the nuances of the law. To take full advantage of your document automation software, you’ll need a place to store all of your unique document templates. Luckily, many platforms offer document storage built right in.
We recommend finding assembly software that allows you to store an infinite number of templates. We also recommend choosing software that will integrate seamlessly with your law firm’s document management software (DMS) and Law Practice Management software (LPM).
This allows you to create documents inside the assembly platform and store them immediately in your DMS or LPM system for easy access and organization.
“If this, then that.” That’s the basic principle of conditional logic, and many assembly platforms offer the functionality to streamline automation. You can develop custom workflows based on the documents you generate.
For example, if a client intake document mentions “estate planning,” your assembly software can generate a last will and testament template automatically. There’s no need to search for a template on your own.
Auto-population goes hand-in-hand with conditional logic. Using our estate planning example above, not only can assembly software generate the will template, but it can also populate client information on your behalf.
Document assembly software can populate virtually any field or data from your document assembly software or your practice management software into a document that you’re’ drafting. This dramatically cuts down on duplicate entry, and ensures accuracy of data within your documents.
Remote work is now more prevalent than ever. Even if your team primarily works inside your law office, there may be times when work must be done while traveling or from home.
In the past, documents were stored on-premises and were inaccessible when working anywhere other than the office. Now, teams can use the best document automation software for law firms to generate legal documents from anywhere.
For example, cloud-based assembly software can be accessed from any browser on any device. And many software platforms offer easy-to-use mobile apps for on-the-go document generation.
With all of the tech tools available to us, there’s no need for your clients to come into the office to simply sign a form. Instead, you can utilize electronic signatures to complete your contracts and other documents.
Some document automation applications will allow you to add signees seamlessly to any document. Plus, some platforms have e-sign capabilities built in as well as document tracking so you can see the progress of your signature request. Some document assembly platforms perform this function natively, while others rely on integration with third-party electronic signature systems (such as DocuSign or RightSignature).
