The Document Drafting Lifecycle
In essence, the document drafting lifecycle offers a holistic view of how legal professionals generate final documents. In that process, documents are initially created or drafted, then checked over thoroughly for both proofreading and formatting errors, and finally reviewed in collaboration with partners. Thinking through all stages of the lifecycle ensures that the resulting documents are:- clear, understandable, and accessible, free from arcane legalese or meaningless boilerplate;
- complete and comprehensive, including every necessary argument or clause while omitting extraneous or irrelevant information;
- correct in their statements of the law and the facts applicable to this specific matter;
- up to date in their citations and references;
- consistent in their format and styling, meeting court rules and firm conventions; and
- free from errors.
Focusing on the Total Lifecycle Improves Individual Documents
Create better documents. Most attorneys already start documents based on preexisting templates or examples from similar cases. While repurposing saves time, it can be fraught with errors. Something as small as forgetting to replace 'he' with 'she' throughout a contract can leave a client wondering whether you were really paying attention to her specific case'or what else you missed. With automated software to shepherd documents from creation through checking and collaboration, you can eliminate these creation errors.Check everything. Similarly, software that automatically proofreads your documents and draws your attention to key clauses by comparing a document with other examples can save time and improve results. We've surveyed legal professionals and found that as many as one in three don't have time to proofread their documents. Wraparound document lifecycle solutions can do the heavy lifting for you during the checking phase, highlighting both proofing errors and formatting inconsistencies.Collaborate seamlessly. Nothing is created in a vacuum today; collaboration with partners is the key both to producing excellent individual documents and to building a library of document examples. But all too often, file versions spiral out of control during collaboration efforts. Reviewers may start from different versions of a draft or may not see suggestions made by other collaborators. Standard word processing software struggles to keep up with formatting and tracked changes for lengthy, complex documents like contracts. These mistakes can be amplified when a 'final' document that didn't incorporate all of the previous collaborators' corrections is then used as the template for a new document.Don't be the attorney whose complaint was so horrendous that the court ordered him to 'certif[y] the pleading has been reviewed and approved by a teacher of the English language' before refiling. If you're wasting too much time trying to produce error-free documents, we can help.Posted in Product Updates
