What Is HotDocs?
HotDocs is one of the most common document assembly platofrms available on the international market. In Australia, it is one of the few document assembly products that has gained any market penetration at all. Whilst in many respects it may not be the most feature-rich document assembly product, or have the best data connectivity, it is very popular, well supported and more importantly - fairly easy to use. If you are familiar with merge tables, imagine that and take it to the nth degree. If you are not, suffice to say that HotDocs enables you to rapidly turn documents into powerful templates that can be re-used. Be warned: it also allows anyone to turn precedent documents into poorly designed templates that are time intensive to maintain.
HotDocs is not a "product" per-se. You do not instal it and bam, it does its thing. HotDocs is more accurately a language and tool kit that integrates with your word processor. The language it installs allows you to program your documents, so that they can make decisions and insert/remove text as needed to create more accurate first drafts of documents. The macros it integrates with your word processor allows it to read those templates, and insert data collected by the program. It is far more powerful than MS Word's mail function and more powerful than all but the heaviest WordPerfect macro scripting. It falls short of the feature-set of VBA, but then, the language is not as complex. In describing the HotDocs programming script, it is quite simply a (comparitively) small command set that is aimed at achieving one function set: document production. Probably the biggest benefit of HotDocs over a "regular" language such as VBA is that HotDocs does all the nitty-gritty for you. You do not have to set up save functions and overwrite checking routines - HotDocs handles it for you. You do not have to create your own dialog objects, navigation buttons and the like - they are also created by way of a drag n drop interface. You do not have to design macro sets and toolbars and the like to list documents, HotDocs has its own library window for this purpose. In short, it is an off the shelf toolkit to take a lot of the tedium out of document assembly.
Cost of HotDocs
The shelf price of HotDocs varies from time to time. As at February 2006, HotDocs User comes in at a little over AUD500.00 per seat. HotDocs Pro (a developer's platform) is a little over AUD1,200.00. HotDocs offers a variety of pricing plans to suit small firms to massive companies, which entail far better prices than the single unit pricing listed here. As with any document assembly product, the purchase price of the software is not, and should never form the large part of your investment. The larger cost by far will usually be either a) in-house development time or b) outsourced consultant time. Remember: HotDocs (or any document assembly product worth its salt) is not a program to install and enjoy; it is a language and toolkit to learn and avail yourself of.
Do-It-Yourself HotDocs
One major feature of HotDocs is that it is (comparitively) simple to use, and 2 days of training can get you up and running with the language. Whilst this is not untrue, it is not entirely accurate either and represents what I believe to be a major hurdle for the industry in Australia. Certainly, you can gain familiarity with the program and learn to produce simplistic templates within a few days. However, to develop intelligent document assembly systems that return real profits, the learning curve is more accurately a year or so. Perhaps 6 months if you are already an accomplished programmer of some stripe. It is simply not possible to learn the entire language and gain the experience in using that language inside days or even weeks. Of course, if you are only purchasing document assembly to "do documents" this isn't an issue. If you are exploring document assembly as a means of leveraging profit, then it is an issue.
If you are purchasing HotDocs, or any document assembly product, be aware that you will be investing rather heavily in learning time, development time and possibly consultancy time. The investment will not end at the "purchase and train" phase. If you are planning on purchase HotDocs and developing in-house, we suggest you read "Developers of Document Assembly" on my forums which deals with advanced document assembly issues. Mainly, it is about how to build a cohesive and robust system from a pile of documents.
HotDocs and Consultants
There are many consultants who design, develop and program using the HotDocs software however, there aren't many of them in Australia. Direct Document Solutions has been developing HotDocs systems for the past five years. Most of our works have been done for law firms in the United States and are subject to non-disclosure agreements. Should you wish to contact us to discuss HotDocs or document assembly generally, please use this page.