Imagine a System

Companies create documents all day, every day. For lawyers, it is slightly different, because documents are a large part of your work product - they are what lawyers actually do a lot of the time. Documents that may LOOK different because of the varying content that may be in them, but are in fact highly repetitive, but with many options and factors to be considered. For law firms especially, such documents are the core of your business.

Your experts create these documents every day - boiler template documents, simple documents, complex documents. But most of them are still repetitive. They may draw on a very wide range of optional (and complex) content, but it is still the same sort of content day in and day out.

If its so damned repetitive, why not automate it? Do companies build cars by hand? Surely there are hundreds of thousands of decisions and calculations that go into a car! No, they are production lined. Because once you build the production line, the only limit on your resale margin is how many cars you can sell from the production line...This is no different.

Imagine a system that:

• is pre-designed with all of the different content that could appear in any given document.
  
• has been designed to ask the questions that will allow it to decide which text is relevant to insert (or delete) based upon a user's answers.
  
• produces at least 80% of your documents in a given area...without editing - hot off the press - your first draft is the one you sign.

This system can produce documents a lot faster than manual drafting. It can reduce human error to a fraction of previous levels. It can enable you to bill a flat rate for producing documents, because they don't take you much time. Why? Because your staff are not re-drafting (and amending, correcting and finalizing) the same clauses from scratch over and over again, with variations depending on human factors such as mood, emotional state or level of activity. They are simply providing data and answering questions that relate to the file in front of them.

Client hasn't supplied us with trust money? The user checks a box and the system knows it needs to insert the relevant paragraph advising we require trust funds. And in fact, the system will not let you proceed at a later date if you don't indicate that trust funds were received! In every instance, the same wording appears, without a lawyer having to dictate the paragraph, without the secretary typing it, and without it needing a minor correction due to a typo or the fact that the paragraph "reads badly" today.  Or maybe the defendant in a matter resides in a different state to the court of issue? It is a simple matter to design the system so that it knows to compare a defendant's state with the state of issue, and include a Form 1 the states don't match.

The examples are endless, but the result is the same across every document, every precedent, every staff member, every day. Quicker production times, because data re-entry and re-drafting is largely eliminated. More consistent document content, because regardless of which lawyer checks a box to indicate the client hasn't provided trust money, the inserted text is the same. And more quality controlled styling and appearance, because all employees are using the same template, not their own version of it, which may or may not be up to date.

With this approach, anyone who uses this system is making the same decisions your best people do.

These types of systems go beyond programming regular templates, and into the realms of "almost intelligent" document systems.  In these systems, it is not unreasonable to expect your documents to be created in one quarter or less of the time of manual drafting. Basha Systems LLC has developed many custom systems over the years on platforms ranging from MasterDraft and SmartWords to the latest offerings from companies such as GhostFill and Exari. Many of these systems, I have worked on or, in some cases, developed under the Basha banner. Basha has built systems that produced document packages in 20 minutes that previously took 5 - 10 hours of drafting and proofing time.

So imagine that system...working for you. All of a sudden, anyone can produce your best documentation within hours of starting on their first day. The mail clerk can create a 5 page statement of claim that is pleading-perfect...in about 5 minutes of time with dictaphone instructions. Solicitors can do their own documents if their secretary is away or its late at night. Program the system to make the same decisions that your best people do.

This is leverage and replication of intellect, knowledge and experience - the holy grail for many law firms.