Drafting is a mission-critical function for all law offices, especially offices that deal with trusts and estates, elder law, and business law. Your legal documents should capture your firm’s intellectual capital and set it apart from other competitors. While drafting methods have remained relatively unchanged for decades, the increasingly hypercompetitive legal market has forced attorneys to seek out and adopt new legal technologies to streamline their drafting processes. 

Below are just a few tips for how attorneys can harness these technologies to streamline the drafting process while retaining document integrity.

1. Collaborate in the cloud. 

Cloud-based document storage allows practitioners to access, save, and collaborate on documents without worrying about the issues related to maintaining in-house servers. And while cloud-based word processing has made many strides over the years, Microsoft Word locally installed on a user’s machine—whether PC or Mac—can still be a useful tool for creating professionally formatted documents. Even if word processing takes place locally on a user’s computer, the document being worked on can be stored on a cloud-based server, offering the following advantages:

• It is more cost-effective. Rather than purchasing physical servers in-house, you can rent cloud-based data storage space. And because these systems update themselves, you do not need to worry about maintenance costs.

• It provides greater flexibility and scalability. Because documents are stored in the cloud, the on-demand virtual space allows you to access documents on any device, at any time, in any place, making collaboration easy and immediate.
  
  
• It is more secure. Cloud-based systems are often better at mitigating cybersecurity risks because they have dedicated full-time, in-house IT staff. This allows you to focus on your legal practice rather than on maintaining IT systems.

The cloud is rapidly overtaking traditional in-house systems as a scalable and cost-effective solution for many legal needs, including drafting. One such drafting system that utilizes the benefits of the cloud is Wealth Docx®, which allows estate planners within a practice to easily access, collaborate, and safely save a variety of estate planning documents from any device. After finalizing the documents, they can be downloaded, printed, and stored on cloud-based systems.

In addition to Wealth Docx, WealthCounsel also offers Elder Docx™ for elder law planning, Business Docx® for business law planning, Gun Docx® for firearms planning, and Wealth Tracx® for trust administration.

2. Ditch the “find and replace” method.

You are getting ready to sit down with a client and discover an error while double-checking the client’s estate planning documents: the name of a previous client whose planning document you used as a template remains in the document. Maybe you have to call the client to delay the meeting to fix the error. Or worse, maybe the client catches it while signing the documents. Whatever the scenario, this type of error is familiar to many estate planning attorneys. 

You can increase your efficiency and reduce the potential for a malpractice lawsuit or breach of attorney-client privilege by utilizing up-to-date legal document templates and document automation solutions to draft your documents. Although it is possible to create your own document automation system and constantly update the templates, it is very time-consuming. Even if you outsource the effort, the oversight and ongoing maintenance is also very time-consuming. So, you must ask yourself: do you want to be in the business of creating and maintaining a document drafting system, or in the business of helping people create, preserve, and pass on their legacies?

The alternative is to use drafting software such as Wealth Docx, which provides an array of estate planning documents that are constantly monitored and updated by in-house legal experts. The drafting process is then automated: upon answering a series of on-screen questions about the client and the plan design, the document is auto-populated with the correct provisions based on the options selected during the interview process.

3. Integrate your systems.

Many practices rely on a patchwork of legal software solutions to run their business—one for their practice management system and another for document preparation. This often means that attorneys must enter client information multiple times, which wastes time and jeopardizes accuracy.

Integrating your systems saves time by reducing the need for duplicate data entry and minimizing the risk of drafting errors. Integration allows the practice management system and drafting software to talk to each other, meaning you only need to enter client information once.

To learn more about WealthCounsel’s drafting solutions and how they can streamline your drafting process, click here.