Law Technology Today From the ABA Legal Technology Resource Center
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Document assembly tools have been around for years and could likely be put to good use in a variety of practice areas and sizes. Yet the adoption rate remains fairly low: according to the 2012 ABA Legal Technology Survey Report (Volume II), just 37% of respondents reported personally using document assembly software.
Some of the hesitation can be attributed to a perception that document assembly tools–while useful–are difficult to learn or implement and too expensive to justify their benefits. While that may have been true at one time, the tools have evolved significantly in recent years and the need for lawyers to pursue efficiency has never been clearer.
In a recent article for LawyersUSA addressing efficient legal document production, practice management guru Jim Calloway wrote:
Today there are many pressures on all businesses to operate more efficiently. While certain legal documents are individually crafted for unique situations, there is also a certain amount of commonality and routine to many documents.
Discussing the efficiency of modern law firms, or perhaps the lack of efficiency, he concluded:
Exceptional law firms will invest the time to bullet-proof the document production system, both to the client’s economic benefit and to free the lawyer from the drudgery of re-proofing the same document.
Jim’s article goes on to discuss several very straightforward and reasonably priced tools available for document generation. He even points to several features in Microsoft Word, a tool available to 97% of respondents according to our 2012 survey, that can be used to automate common drafting functions.
Read the full article to learn how you can get started with document generation: Efficient legal document production for lawyers (LawyersUSA).
