What Do You Want From Document Assembly

Document assembly reduces the amount of staff drafting and proofing time spent for every document that you invest the time to program. The profit margin is incalculable, because it depends on how much work you can put through your system and whether your billing on a flat rate structure rather than a per hour fee. This series of articles covers 3 basic "approaches" to document assembly and should give you an idea of what steps you might consider.

If you are after organisation and centralisation of a precedent library, or to implement basic quality controls and review your precedent currency, you are probably seeking to achieve the following:

• Ensure there is only one version of a precedent or only one version of a specific purpose precedent (i.e.: you will have many letters, but only one precedent for each specific use).
• Precedents only modified by the relevant person, and are reviewed periodically to ensure they are current.
• Ensure precedents are organized by area of practice, are indexed and described adequately for easy location.
• Possibly ensure that all precedents are styled properly so that all documents produced from your precedents look and feel the same (font type, size, heading sizes, RE lines and the like).

In this scenario, it is not likely that you need a document assembly product to achieve your goals.

Before embarking on this approach, you should bear in mind what was covered in the "Organise our templates" article, as this is the foundation of any document assembly project:

You are seeking to mildly automate your precedents something along the lines of...

Please note this is where you should really suspend cynicism. This article focuses on an approach to plan, design and automate a system that embodies your IP and processes. This process more about drilling down and identifying all the moving pieces in staff minds when they draft documents than it is about handling documents.

These sorts of systems are typically designed to simplify the decision making process to the point where a user is not required to know the outcome of answers, but simply has to "fill in the boxes correctly".