Stop High-Value Lawyers, Doing Low-Value Work

Ask any knowledge manager or legal COO where time gets lost, and they’ll point to the same issue: rekeying.

Legal work has always been document-heavy. For mid-sized and major firms, the sheer volume and complexity of legal documents, combined with the need for accuracy, consistency, and efficiency, creates constant operational strain. Despite decades of technological progress, many firms still rely on outdated workflows riddled with manual steps, duplication of effort, and unnecessary rekeying of information across systems.

The result? Highly skilled (and highly paid) legal professionals spend hours on repetitive tasks that add little value to clients but are nonetheless essential to legal service delivery.

Smarter Drafter was built to fix this.

At its core, Smarter Drafter is solving a problem that sits at the heart of modern legal practice: how to deliver high-quality legal documents quickly, accurately, and at scale, without overburdening lawyers or losing control over precedent management.

Manual Drafting and Fragmented Workflows Waste Time and Introduce Risk

In most firms, drafting is still largely manual. Lawyers either start from scratch or use legacy precedent systems that are difficult to maintain and distribute consistently. Even where templates exist, the process of gathering client and matter information, applying the correct clauses, checking formatting, and producing a final client-facing document requires a patchwork of tools, and multiple human touchpoints.

This fragmented process leads to:

• Inefficiencies: High-value lawyers spending time reformatting documents, retyping details, or emailing PDFs for approval.
• Inconsistency: No central control over which version of a clause is being used across different matters, offices, or practice groups.
• Risk: Manual rekeying increases the chance of error, especially when copying client and matter information from one system to another.
  
  

Smarter Drafter eliminates this fragmentation. It offers an end-to-end document automation solution purpose-built for legal work, streamlining every step from instruction-taking through to eSignature. By embedding automation within the existing tools and systems lawyers already use, like Microsoft Word and iManage, it reduces both the friction and the risk associated with change.

Rekeying Is the Silent Killer of Legal Productivity

Lawyers routinely enter the same client and matter data into multiple systems, practice management, precedent automation, version control, eSignature tools, because these systems aren’t connected or were never designed to work together. The result is a hidden tax on legal productivity.

Smarter Drafter is actively fighting a war on rekeying.

Our integration architecture is built to synchronise with all major practice management systems, ensuring that details like client names, matter numbers, parties, and contact information flow directly into your automated documents without duplication. For firms using iManage, Smarter Drafter can be embedded directly within the DMS, allowing lawyers to generate documents without ever leaving their document management workflow.

The impact is immediate: time saved, errors reduced, and less pressure on support staff to manually “plug the gaps” between systems.

Precedent Management Is Often a Bottleneck

In large firms, managing precedents is a balancing act. Knowledge teams want to standardise and control the language used across the practice, but the tools available to them are often inflexible or require technical expertise. As a result, automating or updating complex precedents becomes a bottleneck. Even minor changes, like updating a clause or changing formatting, can take weeks to roll out firmwide.

Smarter Drafter puts control back in the hands of the Knowledge Team.

Our no-code visual builder is designed for legal professionals, not developers. It allows your team to build and update even the most complex automation logic, incorporating decision trees, conditional clauses, and guidance notes, all without writing a single line of code. Combined with our Microsoft Word integration, this means your documents are not just automated, but perfectly formatted, client-facing, and courtroom-ready.

Automated Precedents Can’t Cover Every Scenario: That’s Where Clause Bank Comes In

Even with the best precedent automation, there will always be edge cases, matters that don’t quite fit the standard structure, or clients that require tailored wording. This is where many automation platforms fall short: once the template ends, you’re back to manual edits and outdated clause hunting.

Smarter Drafter Clause Bank changes that.

Clause Bank lives inside Microsoft Word, giving users direct access to a firm-wide, curated library of approved legal language – right at the point of review. Whether you need to drop in a single sentence or a detailed clause, everything is searchable, centralised, and always up to date.

The result? Lawyers can refine automated documents with precision, without compromising compliance, style, or speed.

And with AI-enabled semantic search, even junior lawyers can quickly find the right clause for the context, reducing bottlenecks and preserving firm knowledge.

Clause Bank doesn’t replace your precedents. It completes them.

Mid and Major Firms Need Enterprise-Ready Solutions That Integrate Seamlessly

What sets Smarter Drafter apart in the legal tech market is not just what we automate, it’s how we fit into your existing ecosystem.

Smarter Drafter is one of the only document automation solutions in Australia built from the ground up to integrate deeply with enterprise systems like iManage. As an official iManage Technology Partner, we support both Work 10 cloud and on-prem deployments. Our integration respects matter hierarchies, version control, document naming conventions, and user permissions, ensuring that automation doesn’t come at the cost of compliance or control.

By embedding automation within iManage, rather than bolting it on, Smarter Drafter allows law firms to:

• Reduce change management overheads
  
  
• Maintain a single source of truth for documents and metadata
  
  
• Eliminate the need to move between systems or duplicate documents
  
  

This level of integration is not just a convenience, it’s a strategic advantage.

A Platform That Scales Across Complexity and Volume

While many automation tools focus narrowly, either on high-volume form letters or bespoke, high-complexity templates, Smarter Drafter is uniquely built to scale across both dimensions.

We support every major automation mode a firm might need:

• Lawyer-Driven Automation
  A lawyer completes a guided questionnaire to produce a document.
  
  
• Client-Driven Automation
  Clients enter data through branded web forms that feed directly into automated templates.
  
  
• Data-Driven Automation
  External systems (e.g. PMS, LoB systems) trigger document creation automatically via API – no human required.
  
  

This flexibility is essential for firms that want to standardise quality while supporting a wide range of practice areas, client types, and document workflows. Whether you’re generating a simple letter or a complex, multi-party document pack, Smarter Drafter can handle it.

Why Choose Smarter Drafter

Smarter Drafter is more than just a document automation tool. It’s a platform that enables law firms to operate at scale, without compromising legal quality, consistency, or control.

By solving core issues like rekeying, fragmented workflows, and disconnected clause libraries, and by supporting all three levels of automation, Smarter Drafter empowers mid and major firms to:

• Improve lawyer efficiency
  
  
• Maintain central control over legal content
  
  
• Deliver faster, more accurate, client-facing documents
  
  
• Scale automation across departments and jurisdictions
  
  

One platform. Every scenario. Built for the way law firms actually work.