The “digital transformation” of the legal industry supposedly began in the 1970s, when law firms started relying on computers. But when it comes to the way legal professionals actually interact with legal documents, not as much has changed as one might expect.
The move from paper documents to digital documents may have felt like a revolution, but the reality is that electronic documents were originally designed to reflect their paper counterparts, so they carry the same problems and limitations.
Document generation and assembly systems that rely on .docx and .pdf models aren’t fluid. They create artifacts—documents that reflect a single moment of your database, frozen in time. So when your data points change, you are left to either update your database and regenerate the document to create a new version, or update the document and then hopefully go back and update your database accordingly.
While the rise of case and matter management software has helped reshape the landscape of the legal industry over the last decade, hardly anything has been done to reshape the landscape of document generation and assembly—until now.
Legal Drafting
Legal Drafting is the transformation that legal work has been waiting on for 40 years.
The idea behind Legal Drafting is simple. Legal documents need to be brought to life. They should be easy to build and easy to collaborate on. They should be flexible, yet precise. They should be easy to duplicate, regenerate, or modify. And, above all, they should be connected and responsive, removing the barriers to your database of record.
For every type of legal document—contracts, proposals, orders, motions, pleadings, decisions, filings, etc.—Legal Drafting moves beyond the limitations of .docx and .pdf models to make generating, pulling data, editing, revising, collaborating, and completing documents easier, faster, and more flexible than ever.
Legal Drafting enhances the repeatability and precision of your documents and builds your content database as you draft to better inform your future documents. Drafting and executing documents with high volume, velocity, and complexity becomes manageable through the revolution of live and connected data.
When the digital transformation of legal work first started, creating documents that moved with your work wasn’t possible. The available stack of technology didn’t allow for it. But legal work and technology are both moving forward at a rapid pace. A desire to honor “the way things have always been done” no longer justifies the limitations that are holding legal work behind.
Most legal professionals already recognize the limitations of current document generation and assembly processes and are waiting for something better to come along. And with the current staffing shortages, the legal industry is hungry for another transformation—a true digital transformation—that revolutionizes not only the space in which legal work is done, but also how that work is done.
Filevine and Outlaw are leading that transformation with Legal Drafting.