A lot of discussion about how smaller law firms can use document assembly—see for example this article—isn’t particularly exciting. You might be left with the impression that it’s nothing more than mail merge on steroids. I’ll now try to explain why that’s not the case.
Above is part of a post on Contract-Automation Clearinghouse. To see the rest, go here.
Contract-Automation Clearinghouse is where I now put my posts on contract automation and related topics.
I draft a lot of lease amendments, and I’ve automated the process of drafting those to a degree. It’s more difficult to automate the language that directly amends terms of other documents because of the many possible variations in those documents, but I can still automate a lot of the basic provisions and boilerplate. Even if that still leaves a fair amount of drafting for me to do, having automated that much still saves me time and reduces risk.
I used ContractExpress Cloud for a year, but moved to another product that runs as a Word add-in on the local machine after deciding I wasn’t using enough of CE’s bells and whistles to justify the price tag. It’s an impressive system, though.
Thanks. What other product is that?
For now, I’m using TheFormTool Pro. It doesn’t compare to ContractExpress, but since I’m just one user, I’m familiar with the templates, I don’t need dynamic questionnaires, and I usually only need to customize one document at a time, it has suited my needs. The price difference is significant. I paid $89 for a permanent license instead of the ~$1,000 per year I was paying for ContractExpress Cloud. I could upgrade to Doxsera for an annual $89/year, which would let me link together and customize multiple documents at once.
Of course, I really liked everything that ContractExpress Cloud could do. I like using great (I daresay, the best) technology and well-designed interfaces. But because I wasn’t using CE in a way that generated significantly increased returns compared to my use of TFT, I couldn’t justify the price difference.