Legal Technology and the In-house Lawyer

Document and Contract Automation Software

Lawyers draft innumerable documents—letters, memos, briefs, contracts, discovery requests, discovery responses, pleadings, motions and more. Many of these documents are highly formalized in the sense that the formatting is specialized and that certain incantations must be included. Take for example a services contract: certain terms and definitions will be reused for each new contract, and standard signature blocks will need to be included. Generating new contracts by hand is both a tedious and an error prone process.

The better solution is to use automation software that intelligently renders new contracts based on existing templates, forms, customer data and logic. Such software saves lawyers and staff from the tedium of copying and pasting from old documents, manually checking for pronoun and subject-verb agreement and performing numerous search-and-replace operations. On a given contract, hundreds of manual (but easily automatable) changes often must be made. By turning over the tedium to a computer, in house counsel can focus on more valuable and important tasks, such as ensuring that the language used in templates is up-to-date, correct, and well-worded. This is a theme we’ll return to: Software helps lawyers be better lawyers by letting them focus on what matters most.

Risk Mitigation Factors:

• Reduces risk of inconsistent drafting

• Reduces risk of lower quality standard documents

via Corporate Counsel http://ow.ly/M7e3301ErPc