The Oklahoma Bar Journal January 2024

L aw P ractice T ips

Automated Document Assembly is Easy, Right?

By Jim Calloway

D ECADES AGO, I ASSUMED that technology would soon advance to the point where auto mated document assembly would be fully incorporated in most law offices across the country. While great strides have been made in law office technology tools, and tools for automatically generating documents are much improved over what was available decades previously, many law firms still have not fully embraced auto mated document assembly. Why is that? I can speculate. 1) Using a standard form as a starting point and using copy/paste plus some

well-known as the name Taylor Swift, but most people have heard of it and other AI tools. More poten tial clients will come to expect that lawyers will use appropriate tools to deliver services for less. I also note that Comment 5 to Oklahoma Rules of Professional Conduct Rule 1.5 on fees ends with the admonition, “A lawyer should not exploit a fee arrange ment based primarily on hourly charges by using wasteful proce dures.” 1 Certainly that rule was not drafted with artificial intelligence tools in mind. But the rationale may apply. PRIMER: THE BASICS OF DOCUMENT ASSEMBLY Given the tools available today, here’s how document creation should occur within law firms. You need your clients’ data set in a digital form that can be exported, as well as document templates to receive the data to create the new document. The law firm has a collection of client data in digital format. When documents need to be created, that data set is matched with the template that results in a document with all the client’s information correctly inserted. Sometimes, this document is final and only needs to be reviewed by the responsible attorney;

the responsibility and poten tial liability associated with any open client file. Flat fees for producing those docu ments are therefore strongly indicated, but converting to that system involves plan ning, time and money. 3) Creating the tools for auto mated document assem bly for lawyers is more challenging than it might appear. I draw this conclu sion from watching practice management solutions incrementally release tools to improve their document assembly processes. Legal documents are typically much more complex than other documents. The only automated doc assembly many types of businesses

custom editing to create the final isn’t terribly inefficient or error-prone. It is a major improvement from the typewriter age. assembly involves invest ing time to set up systems that generate documents (or first drafts of documents) in minutes. The hourly billing model applied to minutes does not properly charge clients for the value of the document and is inadequate for the law firm to recover the time and money invested in creating and maintaining the system – not to mention

need is contact informa tion for emailing offers and invoices. Businesses that sell primarily online

2) Automated document

have their e-commerce tool doing the sales and accounting records. 4) Investing in new technology

is often a hard sell in law firms because of concerns it may impact revenue.

But AI tools have now changed the expectations. The name ChatGPT is perhaps not as

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