DocMoto’s document assembly technologies are about automating the process of creating a document.
This automation can be as simple as replacing a placeholder with a client’s name, or as complex as inserting entire “snippets” of a document based on a set of criteria.
Why bother with document assembly?
There are two main reasons why document assembly is so popular, particularly amongst lawyers.
- It saves a lot of time.
- It ensures a document’s accuracy.
This is because even the smallest law firms create masses of documents, and firms small and large alike all create documents with a sizeable degree of replication, making automation highly appealing.
The DocMoto framework - the perfect starting point
When we started to research the issue we realised that most of the prerequisites to achieve sophisticated document assembly were already in place.
Document master templates - Since DocMoto version 2 users have been creating all documents from a single common and uniform starting point, our document masters.
The existence of this workflow makes it a very simple step to introduce document assembly at the point of creation of a new document.
Multi-user - DocMoto is multi-user, with each user having their own “home” directory.
This makes it easy to separate document masters and other content by user. For example we can make use of the user’s “home” directory to store user specific content, such as a signature file.
Fine grain security - Hand in hand with being a multi-user system goes fine grained security. It is essential when more than one user is accessing the system.
We have been able to harness DocMoto’s outstanding security to ensure that document masters and document assembly snippets can be separated by user group making even large configurations easy to manage, and of course this ensures the wrong users cannot access the wrong content.
Tagging - DocMoto supports very sophisticated document AND folder tagging.
DocMoto’s tagging feature set is amongst the most powerful anywhere, let alone amongst Mac based products.
We have used this to form the basis by which the document assembly process works.
For example a document with placeholders for a client address can readily have those placeholders replaced by tag values lodged against a client’s folder - simple!
Overall then, when it came to developing a document assembly solution we found we weren’t starting from scratch, far from it.
Putting it all together
DocMoto’s document assembly technologies support the following key concepts:
- All automation initiated at the point of document creation.
- Client specific data inserted based on folder rules.
- User specific data inserted based on multi-user framework.
- Both simple text and entire document snippets supported.
- Full audit trail and post production reporting facilities.
What do you need to get started?
The time savings, efficiency improvements and increases in document accuracy are something every law firm want to take advantage of.
To start making the improvements for your firm all you need is DocMoto 3.6, MS Word 2011 (or greater) and a little time to set it all up.
