For law firms and corporate legal teams alike, document automation has the potential to save large amounts of time and money. By automating the creation of your documents, you can free up valuable time, reduce errors, and ensure consistency across your organisation.
But how do you get started with document automation? And how can you be sure you're getting the most out of it? In our joint webinar with Gavel, Thom shared his expert advice from automating hundreds of document templates for law firms and corporate legal teams:
Why Automate?
The "why" of automation is clear. It's about more than just convenience; it's about making a real, measurable impact on your business:
- Massive Time and Efficiency Savings: The primary benefit of automation is the significant reduction in the time it takes to draft documents. It's possible to achieve over 80% in time savings compared to manual methods of drafting, even if automation provides a rough first draft that can be further reviewed and tailored by a lawyer.
- Unwavering Consistency: Automation establishes a "single source of truth" for your documents. This eliminates the inconsistencies and potential errors that can arise when people are working from different templates or past specific examples. The result is a higher standard of quality and fewer errors as everyone works from a continually updated ‘single source of truth’.
- Education and Risk Minimisation: Automation tools have a fringe benefit of being able to provide guidance and education to end users as they complete the process, both ensuring correct input as well as upskilling users as to the context and necessary considerations of the underlying precedent document or process. By building guidance into your automation questionnaires, you can walk users through the critical points of a document, ensuring they understand the process and minimising the risk of errors. This also makes it possible to extend the use of these tools to a wider audience, including your clients.
Where to Start with Automation
The idea of automating all your documents can be overwhelming. Thom suggests a strategic approach to getting started:
- Quality In, Quality Out: The success of your automation efforts depends on the quality of your source documents. Before you automate, make sure your templates are well-drafted, standardised, and up to your organisation's standards. This isn’t a pitfall specific to document automation, but rather serves an important reminder that internal templates and processes often need reviewing to ensure they continue to best serve their business.
- Start Small for a Big Impact: You don't have to boil the ocean. Begin by automating simple, high-volume documents and processes. These will allow you to get some quick wins, build user adoption, and gather data to inform your future automation efforts.
- Auxiliary/Supplemental Documents: These are often the easiest to automate. Think about notices, prescribed forms, and other standardised documents that you use frequently. Whilst a ‘master’ document such as a lease may be very complex and always require specific drafting, the associated supplemental documents and notices can be automated very quickly and would be used on every matter involving a new lease - providing immediate RoI.
- Court/Registry Forms: Forms are a great starting point because they naturally guide the questions you need to ask in your automation questionnaire. And with tools such as Gavel, you can even automate PDFs templates.
- High-Volume Agreements: Identify the agreements you draft most often, even if they are relatively small. The cumulative time savings from automating these high-volume documents can be substantial.
Maximising Your ROI
Once you've got the basics down, you can start to explore more advanced automation techniques to maximise your return on investment:
- Don't Strive for 100% Automation (at least not at first): For complex documents, it's not always necessary to automate every single detail. Focus on the 80/20 rule: automate the 20% of the document that will give you 80% of the time savings. This might include things like party details, key terms, and gendered language. You can always automate more of the document later.
- Automate Multiple Documents at Once: This is where you can really start to see some impressive efficiency gains. Design your questionnaires to generate multiple related documents from a single set of inputs. For example, you could create a client onboarding questionnaire that generates a welcome letter, a DPA, an NDA, and your terms and conditions all at the same time.
- Leverage Bulk Automation: For projects that involve a large number of similar documents, bulk automation is a must. By feeding structured data from a spreadsheet into your automation tool such as Avvoka’s MassDraft, you can generate hundreds of documents in a fraction of the time it would take to do it manually. This can turn minutes of work into hundreds of hours of saved time, which can have a major impact on your profitability, especially for fixed-fee work.
Feeling inspired to start your automation journey but not sure where to begin? Or perhaps you already have an automation system in place and need to scale your efforts.? Turning your focus to expert support can make all the difference. NodeMasters has extensive experience helping businesses take their first steps with document automation, from scoping and template optimisation to choosing the right technology. For those already using document tools such as Contract Express, Avvoka & Gavel, they offer flexible, on-demand support to help you maintain and enhance your existing automated templates.
Find out more about how NodeMasters helps law firms & corporate legal teams get the most from document automation >
