Document assembly, or document automation or
document composition is a method of turning
templates into finished
documents.
Applications range
from low volume production of complex documents, such as contracts,
to high volume mass mailouts (sophisticated mail merge
applications). The business value of automation depends on the cost
of producing the template, compared to the value of the finished
documents to be produced over the lifetime
of the template. See
"Document
Product" Strategy: Optimizing Precedent Investment for Higher
Profits and Better Service for a value analysis in the context
of the business of a law office.
The variable values needed to
turn the templates into finished documents may come from a user
interview, a database or web service, or some combination.
The
approach of using
interview-based
software and an interview format was pioneered by
Stan
Neeleman,
Larry Farmer, and
Marshall Morrise of
Brigham Young University in a
project funded by West Publishing Company (now
Thomson West). This system
eventually evolved into a product called
HotDocs (Features of
HotDocs).
At present there are nearly a dozen different
flavors of document assembly software. The leading products are (in
alphabetical order): D3, DealBuilder, Exari, GhostFill, HotDocs,
Rapidocs, and QShift. They fill different niches and offer a range
of capabilities from clause management to open standards to
e-commerce optimization to contract process automation. Some are as
simple as the feature sets of Microsoft
Word and
Corel WordPerfect. Other can be as
elaborate as the automated relevance engine included in
Business-Integrity's
DealBuilder product
(From Business
Integrity). These tools allow an "trusted author" to create a
system which can be used by "untrusted users" to create fairly
complex and intricate legal documents without knowledge of the
underlying law or content.
There is also a fairly new hosted
document assembly solution offered by
(AmazingDocs) This system is geared
towards sales organizations and automates assembly of PowerPoint
presentations and Microsoft Word documents. In addition to
questionnaire-based document assembly, the system offers flexible
collaboration functionality.
External
LinksBasha Systems LLC, 'Document Assembly Articles;
Document Automation Article
IndexLauritsen, Marc, ‘Fall in line with document assembly:
applications to change the way you practice’, Law Office Computing,
February/March 2006, p. 70.
[960]Lauritsen,
Marc, ‘It’s About Time’, Law Practice Management, April 2002, p.
26.
[961].
Mountain, Darryl R.,
'Disrupting conventional law firm business models using document
assembly',
International Journal of Law and Information Technology
2006; doi: 10.1093/ijlit/eal019
[962]Seth Rowland has a blog dedicated to
issues regarding document assembly called
Document Assembly (and Case
Management).
See also
Documentation
generator
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