Document Automation: What It Is and How It Helps Lawyers

Documents are an essential part of the knowledge worker’s day. Contracts, invoices, memos, purchase orders – there is an endless list of documents that must be generated, reviewed, and processed in the modern-day workplace.

And one of the industries most weighed down by this endless crush of documents is the legal profession. This is why there is a growing trend in the legal industry toward the new world of document automation.

But the term “document automation” is bandied about so much, it has led to some confusion over what this concept entails. How do you “automate” a document? What real-world examples do we have of document automation? And how exactly can document automation help attorneys and the legal industry? We explore these questions below.

What Do We Mean by Document Automation?

Document automation refers to the use of automated systems to facilitate the processing and generation of electronic documents. The “processing” and “generation” aspects are two separate elements of document automation.

Received documents can be processed to automatically collect required data. Automated document generation, on the other hand, refers to the automatic creation of new documents. 

For document generation, the general process is to first create a template for any document that contains numerous standardized terms. Then that template needs to have information filled in to create a new document. Standard documents can then be created in less time with fewer errors.

How Does Document Automation Benefit the Legal Industry?

As an especially document-intensive industry, the legal industry stands to benefit greatly from document automation. Drafting legal documents is often a time-consuming and mundane task, where it can be easy to make mistakes.

At the same time, the potential negative consequences for even minor errors can be substantial. So attorneys and their support staff need to be able to generate standardized documents quickly and accurately. Document automation can help them do so.

Nonetheless, there is some continuing resistance in the legal industry to the adoption of document automation, especially for small firms and solo attorneys, despite the known advantages of automation.

For a law firm considering document automation, it can be easy to focus on the perceived downsides of implementation. How difficult will it be to change processes for document generation? What will be the financial costs of introducing new technology? And how much time and aggravation will the new technology cause for attorneys and staff?

But before focusing on the potential disadvantages of document automation, firms should first focus on the flip side. What are the disadvantages of keeping the traditional process of manual document creation? 

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Disadvantages of Manual Document Creation

The following are just a few disadvantages of sticking with old-school manual document creation:

  • Risk of Errors: There is an ongoing risk of simple human error with manual document creation – using the wrong version of a document, mistyping data, failing to copy and paste in all the right places. And the “find and replace” function has its limits, since it will miss even slightly misspelled versions of the same information.

  • Time-Consuming: Manual document creation is repetitive and time-intensive, taking attorneys, paralegals and staff away from higher-value activities.

  • Low Employee Satisfaction: One study found that workers in the global legal industry spent over 3 hours per day on repetitive computer administration tasks. Nearly half of workers found these tasks boring and a poor use of their skills. 

In short, traditional manual document creation can lead to errors, wasted time, and low company morale.

Advantages of Document Automation

Happier, more engaged employees is just one major benefit. Some of the other advantages to lawyers of implementing document automation include:

  • More Accurate Documents: When documents are auto-populated with data from forms or questionnaires, the risk of error is minimized.

  • Increased Efficiency: A single standard document, such as a non-disclosure agreement, can be created in under a minute, as opposed to several hours.

  • Updated Versions of Documents: Document templates can be easily updated, ensuring all future versions of that same document type follow the same format.

  • Higher Client Satisfaction: Clients will appreciate the ease of filling out forms or questionnaires, and document turnaround times can go down drastically.

  • Decreased Costs: Firms can save on paper and printing costs, IT support, and overhead associated with in-house administrative work.

  • Retention of Company Knowledge: If a firm relies on one employee or lawyer with the knowledge to create a specific type of document, such as for a particular client or jurisdiction, they run the constant risk of that person leaving. The use of document templates allows the firm to retain this knowledge.

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What Legal Documents Can Be Automated?

Legal documents can be excellent candidates for automation. Many of these documents are boilerplate, with only specific details changing from one version to the next. This allows for the creation of a standard template with specific fields that are changed from document to document.

Consider the example of a client engagement agreement for a certain legal service – perhaps an estate plan or corporate formation. The firm’s template would contain many standard contract terms that the firm will want included in every agreement of this type.

The variable terms – such as client name, date and fee amount – can then be entered and auto-populated into the agreement. And if the firm wants to make changes to the standard terms in the engagement agreement, it makes its changes to the template itself, ensuring that all future agreements will include these revisions.

The possibilities for document automation go far beyond this. Documents such as court forms and trust and estate plans can be generated easily in a wide range of legal areas – litigation, family law, corporate law, and general transactional law, just to name a few.

With the right document automation software, law firms large and small can make a huge leap toward higher productivity. Lawyers are the ultimate knowledge workers, with many demands on their time and mental capacity. Simple creation of routine documents can free up their minds for the higher-level thinking and strategy they need to thrive in a rapidly changing world.