Originally published on July 12, 2010 in our free SmallLaw newsletter.
In my previous SmallLaw column, I explained how to use Styles in Word 2007. This week let's talk document assembly, which represents the holy grail that every lawyer has sought for decades, whether acknowledged consciously or just the subject of quiet fantasy. However, the creation of document assembly systems to build documents for areas of practice such as contracting, real estate, estate planning, and even litigation rarely comes to fruition. Why?The Problem With Document Assembly Systems
The biggest impediment to document assembly success is the very nature of document assembly tools. Powerhouse document assembly engines such as Capsoft's venerable HotDocs offer extensive (and impressive) "smart" logic, including conditional branching and selection of optional paragraphs based on how prior questions are answered.
However, it's complex to build such systems — they usually have to be outsourced. While the upfront cost tends to pay for itself, it's a daunting wall to scale. Most firms never start the climb, and end up with a simplistic document assembly system that just fills in the blanks to routinize documents. These templates can certainly be helpful for documents that require nothing more than being personalized to a specific case or client, but it's not useful for most contracts and agreements.
Using Word 2007's Quickparts as a Document Assembly Tool
Law firms really need some type of clause-based document assembly. Clause-based document assembly? What the heck is that? Imagine this — slice and dice your best contracts into their independent, individual clauses. A hierarchical organizational system enables you to organize the clauses first by area of practice area, such as "Real Estate," then a sub-classification, such as "Commercial Leases," then another sub-sub-type, such as "Escalation Clauses."
Next imagine that you could pull up your clause library, click on the clauses you need and insert as little as a sentence to as much as several pages of content with only a cursor point anywhere in a document you're building. Would that be useful? When you pick yourself up from the floor after momentarily lapsing into bliss-induced unconsciousness, you'll find you have such a system already.
It's called Word 2007 (or 2010) and its QuickParts feature, or what my now-14 year old daughter once referred to as "Lego," building blocks upon which you build documents.
QuickParts really couldn't be simpler. Go to the Insert Ribbon in Word and you'll see the QuickParts item in the "Text" subsection on the right side of the ribbon area. Pull down the button to see the menu of options, just to familiarize yourself with the landscape, especially the Building Blocks Organizer. It's the hierarchical repository I mentioned. Be sure to scroll through all the standard building blocks included with Word — great ways to spruce up documents and call attention to specific language.
To create a QuickPart (a "building block"), highlight any range of text you wish to save as an independent clause. Then from the QuickParts button, select the option that says "Save Selection to QuickParts Gallery." Add a "Name" (i.e. Merger Clause), pick a "Gallery" (top-level organization), then create or select an existing category (i.e. Commercial Leases). Save it and it will be available to pick from the Building Block Organizer, which has selections sortable by column headers including Name, Gallery and Category.
With Word's QuickParts, what you will amass over time is nothing short of a powerhouse clause-based document assembly system — the kind of document assembly most lawyers have fantasized about, but never thought they could achieve without buying any specialized software.
Written by Ross Kodner of MicroLaw.
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