The Oklahoma Bar Journal February 2023

What does that have to do with timesheets and hourly billing? First, greater use of document assembly will save lawyers a great deal of time. But given the invest ment of upgrades, skill and pro gramming invested to accomplish this result as well as the potential liability all lawyers assume to properly represent their clients, hourly billing may not be the best method to charge for those highly automated tasks. Today, hourly billing is still the standard in many law firms. It is objective. Business clients are accustomed to it. In larger firms, it provides one objective measure of associate attorneys’ progress and value to the firm. Firms have the infrastructure in place to do hourly billing every month. So let’s examine making hourly bill ing more efficient.

pleadings rather than recreating it. But one can make errors using copy and paste. There are two traditional ways to use automated document assembly. One is the interview method, where the document drafter responds to questions and those answers are used to complete the document. Another method is to have your form set up to import data from a client information database to assemble the docu ment. We are moving closer to the day when the first drafts of many legal documents will be generated by combining client data from the client file with forms and clauses selected by the attorney. Even tools using the interview method ask if you want to save the answers to the questions so that when you get ready to create the next document on the same matter, you won’t have to reenter that data.

tool should be considered a tool for first drafts rather than final drafts at this point. Developments will continue. This demonstrates the power of using data. If client information in our law firms only exists on paper, it cannot be a part of any automation – until someone enters the information into a computer. For lawyers, one area of data use is related to automatic docu ment assembly. Many law firms are dealing with how to better capture and use their data. In the early days of computers in law offices, we first reused data by the process of copying and pasting. You won’t misspell the client’s dif ficult name when you copy from a document with it correctly spelled. And once someone has properly designed a case style in a litigation matter, everyone will be copying and pasting the style into their

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THE OKLAHOMA BAR JOURNAL