How can lawyers engage clients in document automation?

2022-02-07

Document automation technology enables lawyers to make document production more efficient. Lawyers use the technology to turn their regular templates into automated - digital templates. Creating documents from automated templates is 90% faster compared to regular drafting in Word, and significantly reduces the risk of error.

For these reasons, document automation proved highly beneficial for document production in law firms, especially within corporate, employment, real estate and other practices that routinely produce standardized documents.

To be able to reap benefits of document automation, lawyers need to initially invest time and energy to automate their standardized templates. We described here how this automation process works.  

Once the firm has automated its templates, it can use them not only for producing documents internally, but as an asset with which it can engage with the clients.

Lawyers often supply templates to clients who then adapt the templates themselves. This process is liable to mistakes, as explained here .

Law firms can help clients avoid these mistakes by giving access to law firm's automated templates. The clients will then follow law firm's automated instructions when drafting the actual documents out of templates.   

Draftomat infrastructure is allowing lawyers to become innovative in this manner. It can be used as a white label solution by law firms which can develop their own sites for sharing automated template libraries with clients on a subscription basis. Subscribed clients get access to libraries through individual user accounts set up by the law firm.

Draftomat also allows lawyers to share individual templates with clients. The client receives a link to the relevant automated template and populates it by following law firm's automated instructions. Our experience shows that sharing individual templates with clients is the best way for law firms to start raising awareness in clients of the benefits of document automation.

Draftomat has the necessary infrastructure to support firms in improving existing or setting up new business lines around document automation. The licensing system we developed allows firms to choose which templates they want to share with a specific client and specify how many people in the client's organization should have access to the template and for how long.

Draftomat team provides full support to firms that want to innovate their business by setting this type of digital client service. We do so by training lawyers on automation or automating their templates when needed. Our team also advises firms on creating a viable business model around document automation service.