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It can, it does, and I do it every day for a living. In all honesty, I couldn't justify my hourly rate to draft simple systems that reflect no logic trees or decision making processes - it just wouldn't be a smart investment for clients of my company. If you can sit down with your most complex series of documents and explain what decisions are made and what the results of those decisions are, I can program a system to reproduce your thinking for leverage by members of your firm.
I hear this quite often and its one of my pet peeves. The reason there are very few people in Australia who have seen this level of automation is because no one really stops and takes a hard look at document assembly (because its only for simple stuff, right? Why bother spending serious time!). Unfortunately, most of my time is spent designing and building systems that are subject to non-disclosure agreements which means I cant display what I'm on about here (kind of like Rob the dentist for Oral-B). So until such time as I am able to write a system to show off the possibilities, I'm stuck purely with ranting, rather than showing.
Here's some examples of systems that we have written:
- Debt recovery - single interview up front as to parties involved, who the client is (may not be a party to the action), and every document thereafter is finalised and signed within 5-10 minutes. All interest is calculated (yes, on reducing balances at different interest rates), plurals are referenced, dates are remembered - everything done.
- Leasing - a 400 page lease, including term sheet - reducing the drafting and proofing time of complex American leases - what used to take 2 partners a 1 week period now takes a partner and a junior attorney around 1 day.
- Mortgages - as many purchasers (who may or may not be borrowers), vendors and guarantors as you require involved in a transaction regarding one or more properties (and not all vendors/purchasers may relate to all properties). Automatically produce all your documentation quickly and easily for as many clients as required. Leverage the common documentation across all clients, while still retaining the individual documentation requirements on a client-by-client basis.
- Wills & Estate Planning - have a look at InterActive Legal Wealth Transfer Planning - a system so complex and comprehensive its incredible, designed to plan, document, advise and finalise the dispersion of multi-million dollar estates - before or after death. All leveraged from one of the brightest legal minds in America, Jonathan G. Blattmachr.
- Winding Up and Bankruptcy - systems that will reduce your total drafting time on all uncontested winding up or bankruptcy documentation for the entire matter - to around 20-30 minutes. Also includes date comparisons to make sure that your advertising is done correctly, automatic selection and population of liquidators/trustees and the like.
- Quotes and Tenders - systems that contain all the services, rates, upsells, flat fees, blended rates and products you offer to produce quotes and tenders within minutes, not hours or days. Cater to any variants you want - cost per square meter, dollars per hour/day/week, flat fees, percentage penalties, liquidated damages and overdue payments, scales of costs and the like. If you have a database of case studies, set it up to automatically pull in the relevant ones for each tender - no more copying, pasting and reformatting.
- Interim and Final Reports - if you have a quotation system, then you'll probably want interim and final reports - easy to set up as most of the code is already there from the quotation system - a few clicks will automatically list out everything that has been done and where a given project or matter is at. And when the work is done, a few more clicks will produce all the dates, amounts and other information that builds up over the course of a matter.
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