Document Automation Experts

Our Services

Document Automation Strategy

We can assist with the adoption of automation within your firm or team, leveraging our experience to ensure a smooth transition to automated processes. We help you decide which documents used in your practice areas or business units lend themselves best to automation and which are more likely to achieve adoption within your teams most quickly. We will work closely with you to understand your specific needs and tailor a strategy that aligns with your business objectives.

Creation of Bespoke Automated Templates

Your automation journey starts with the selection of a document automation platform by you, following its evaluation and ultimate integration with the rest of your tech stack by your Innovation or IT teams. As part of this, we can introduce you to document automation software vendors and give you our views on the features that a document automation platform should include, to help in assessing value-for-money and efficiency outcomes.

Following that we create bespoke, automated templates of your important contracts and other documents. Those templates will then be ready for your teams of end-user lawyers to interact with via a simple, intuitive, questionnaire from which they can either create drafts of documents that can be further amended by them or produce a final document ready to be deployed in your business.

We can provide training for end-users on the templates created by us, ensuring that end-users are well-equipped to utilise the automated templates effectively. In addition, we can train certain end-users or other in-house professionals, on the techniques necessary to maintain the automation we have implemented.

Training and Support Services

Preparation and Mapping of Underlying Precedents/Documents

Maintenance of Automated Templates

We believe that automated templates are meant to be a dynamic tool for your practice areas or business. As such we believe in early deployment of automated templates to engage with end-users and garner feedback, but at the same time, that templates should develop over time as they are updated, amended and improved. This is best effected by your in-house professionals, if the resource is there, but if not, we are available to assist in updating and maintaining templates on any ad hoc basis that integrates with your business.

In order to create automated templates that seamlessly integrate with your business, the starting point is reviewing the documents that will be automated so as to identify and map the necessary inputs.This means identifying:

• Conditional text – sentences, paragraphs, definitions or entire sections that are present in the end-user’s document depending on the satisfaction of specified conditions. These conditions can be programmed as simple “If X is present, then Y is inserted” automation, but layering, or nesting, conditions within conditions is where highly bespoke outputs are possible and real value is created.

• Placeholder text – information or text that is inserted multiple times within a document following the appropriate response to a single question.

• Clause libraries – alternative clauses or information to be considered by the end-user on a non-automated basis, tagged with metadata to assist in evaluating the suitability of this drafting in various potential scenarios. This could create the equivalent of playbooks for certain contracts and certain clients.

• Mathematical calculations – the equivalent of Excel functionality, to be built directly into automated documents.

• Repeated inputs and text transformation – instances where inputs could be automatically repeated an indefinite number of times (for example where the number of parties varies from transaction to transaction). Similarly, text could be automatically transformed to a different style by, for example, switching between all capitals and initial capitals automatically, without requiring additional input from end-users. The more sophisticated automation platforms have a wealth of functional and connective operations that can be used to manipulate text in ways that are limited only by one's imagination.

• Drafting notes – guidance to the end-user lawyer to assist in putting the question, and the underlying legal or commercial issue, in context so as to generate an informed response. This could include links to further exposition on the same issues as a useful tool for the continuing professional development of your end-users, particularly junior members of your team.

We are able to work with your PSLs and other in-house professionals to prepare and map the underlying documents, or take over that process ourselves prior to automating the relevant templates. We are experienced transactional lawyers and as such can look at any legal contract or document and identify in the first instance the conditionality and inputs that could lend themselves to automation. Additionally, we are able to help identify drafting ambiguities or inconsistencies in the documents that should be resolved prior to automation, thus helping to reduce risk and ensure consistency across all your legal documentation.

Furthermore, as experienced lawyers, we are able to undertake in the first instance, the necessary testing of the multiple outputs that could arise from the layering of conditionality, and present this to your in-house professionals to approve. By undertaking this testing, we reduce the need for your internal resources to devote significant time to running through the numerous scenarios that could result from the automation process.