Document Assembly & Case Management Blog

Last week I stubbed my thumb ... And while this may not have seemed like a major injury, I came to realize the cost on my productivity.

The old saw goes: “You don’t appreciate me.  All you do is gripe and complain ... But you’ll miss me when I am gone.  That will be my revenge.” During a recent server rebuild, combined with fresh rebuilds of several PC’s that saw came true.  You see, once with got Windows Small Business Server and Windows XP Pro up on the machines, the fun began… Nothing would be complete until “Time Matters” or LNFOPBTM was back up.

If Santa had a practice management system ... what would he do?  As the population grows, Santa’s elves have been hard-pressed to keep up with “the List” (you know the one ...of who is naughty and who is nice) and provide fast and accurate responses.  The elves have been working overtime (they always do) as the big day approaches. But the List is just too long.  Keeping the list current is a gargantuan task.  Just finding all the parchment and ink requires daily shipments for Ink from India and parchment from Sri Lanka (Yes ... Santa is part of the global economy). So ... what if we gave Santa a practice management system?  As a non-profit, Santa might even be eligible for software discounts or a NFR license to LNFOPBTM.

I have generally kept this blog free of product promotions and endorsements (not to mention split infinitives).  Basha Systems LLC has recently added a treasure trove of information to its main website (www.bashasys.com) and a new subdomain (http://estateplanning.bashasys.com) and added products to the web store (http://store.bashasys.com).  I encourage you to look at those sites for your edification and our possible remuneration.  But I should let you know that Basha Systems LLC is in the process of transformation from focusing predominantly on technology consulting to a product development company.  Don’t worry … we will continue to provide consulting services. It pays the bills; its fun; and it gives us ideas for product development.

Lawyers deal with risk every day.  Whether responding to a summons and complaint, drafting an estate plan, or structuring a limited partnership, lawyers are called on to identify the areas of risk and resolve them.  Because most lawyers lack formal actuarial training, few lawyers can quantify the actual level of risk in a given situation, or the exact degree to which their actions and advice reduce that level of risk.  And yet, “risk reduction” is the main reason businesses and individuals hire lawyers. This articles explores the nature of risk, how lawyers assess risk, and how they can profit from doing a proper risk assessment.

This October finds me on the road.

For better or worse, the future of document assembly is on the Web. The web offers cheaper maintenance, quicker updates, and a more consistent look and feel. The web is also the most cost-effective on total cost of ownership ("TCO").  The catch is that startup costs are much greater for web deployment of automated templates.  Particularly since most law firms wish to “dip before they dunk”, the presence of desktop or networked document assembly solutions is critical to the development of automated content.  In the past five years, millions of dollars have been invested in innovative web-delivery of automated document creation systems.  By contrast, the investment in client/server based document assembly software has been minimal.

Over the past decade, document assembly systems have come and gone.  Some, like HotDocs 4.2, HotDocs 5.x, CAPSAuthor, WinCAPS, SmartWords, Agility, FastDraft, Form Bank, MasterDraft, MillRace, NovaDocs, PowerTXT, Scrivener, ThinkDocs, and WorkForm, are no longer supported.  Some like GhostFill, ProDoc, WinDraft, and Perfectus have only a small developer community that provides limited support. Others, like WordVBA and Wordperfect have macros tools that require dedicated technicians to support and maintain. Yet other systems, like Pathagoras, D3 and qShift lack support for traditional programming techniques like repeat loops, nested IF statements, and variable scripting.

The result is that thousands of legal templates are locked in poorly supported legacy systems, representing hundreds of thousands of hours of programming and invaluable legal workproduct.  This article explores a process of identify and extracting the business rules and workproduct from these legacy systems and moving them to more powerful and better support platforms such as HotDocs or DealBuilder.

There is much talk about the “Holy Grail” in document assembly.  As those who have seen “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” or more serious students of the Arthurian Romance (as opposed to those who have read “The DaVinci Code”, the Holy Grail is a “chalice” or “cup” which held the blood of the real Christ, was kept as a holy relic by the church for centuries and then was lost to history.  During the middle ages, knights went on quests to “find” and “recover” the Grail.  The Grail was never found.  But the “search for the Grail” filled up thousands of pages of literature, and the hunt for the Grail kept thousands of knights diverted in a quest that kept them from seeking to overthrow corrupt monarchies.

In the world of document assembly, one vendor has claimed to have achieved “the Holy Grail”.  The technology will not be available till late in 2007.  When it is, we will review it.  The question is not whether the Grail can be found, but whether it will be the “solution”.

For the past several years I have been running a virtual office with collaborators in multiple locations.  We have tried a number of collaboration tools, including GoToMeeting and GoToMyPC, Groove, Time Matters World, with mixed success.  Most of the work was project based, where control of the project files could be passed (as a football) from one collaborator to another.  This works as long as you can pass control.  However, there are times when we have needed to have simultaneous control of a project.  For those, we have now standardized on a Wiki.