Importance of Document Automation When Starting a New Law Firm

Smarter Drafter, along with other leading tech providers, recently participated in the "How to Launch a Law Firm 2024" eBook by Lawyers Weekly.

At Smarter Drafter, we strongly advocate for the integration of legal technology into every law firm's tech stack. It is crucial for law firm owners to consider including it into their practice from the outset. This is why Smarter Drafter was invited to contribute a column to the "How to Launch a Law Firm 2024" eBook by Lawyers Weekly, offering valuable insights and advice to new law firm owners on how to establish a successful practice.

About this eBook

In the "How to Launch a Law Firm 2024" guide, we delve deep into essential topics for new law firm owners, covering everything from selecting the perfect legal workspace to mastering business administration, ensuring the importance of proper information management, implementing an efficient document management system, and optimising legal processes with cutting-edge document automation technology.

Why new law firms need document automation software

In our section of the eBook, we talked about how automation platforms streamline legal operations. This is especially important for new firms starting out, as incorporating document automation software like Smarter Drafter into a new firm will provide lawyers with much-needed content to generate standard legal forms and templates across major practice areas.

Since all documents are standardised and produced without errors in several minutes, lawyers can enjoy considerable time savings that they would have normally spent manually drafting. In fact, some of Smarter Drafter's customers are reporting that they have saved more than 3 hours per matter since they adopted the automation platform.

With all this time saved, lawyers can focus more on strategic client engagement and case analysis, all while helping sole practitioners manage various responsibilities related to running a new business.

Steve Hantos, CEO of Smarter Drafter, says "When starting a law firm, time is of the essence. Practitioners must prioritise delivering outcomes over perfecting systems, as completing matters directly correlates with payment. An automation solution with preloaded precedents offers a ‘fast start’, allowing firms to begin practising immediately."

But document automation doesn't only save time and reduce errors, it also improves consistency. Long gone are the days of outdated Word documents with broken macros, scattered text files for commonly used clauses, spreadsheets for tracking work, and separate eSignature solutions.

Modern automation platforms streamline and integrate these processes across your entire firm, ensuring everything is up-to-date, consistent, and connected. Document automation also ensures consistency during the drafting process. In a new firm with new fee-earners from all different walks of life, it's very difficult to manage the content that gets produced. Namely, the language, formatting and styling can vary from one team member to another. Having a document automation platform that produces standardised content means that the documents you create for your clients are always on-brand and consistent.

With a document automation platform set up from the onset, you can be sure that your law firm is prepared for success without being bottlenecked by outdated processes and workflows.

Download our infographic

We have summarised our column from the eBook in a short infographic. Download it from here.
Alternatively, if you'd like to download the full version of the "How to Launch a Law Firm 2024" eBook, you can do so for free from the Lawyers Weekly website.

About Smarter Drafter

Smarter Drafter is a complete end-to-end automation platform designed specifically for lawyers and automates the creation of legal precedents, from online instruction-taking to eSignatures. It features an expanding library of fully automated precedents across dozens of key practice areas, including family, estate, and commercial law.

Smarter Drafter has delivered more than 100,000 completed documents for thousands of lawyers across Australia. The platform integrates advanced automation technologies and revolutionises legal workflows by providing comprehensive automation solutions and streamlining document creation, and management processes.