As you may have read in one of our Industry Insights articles, it doesn’t matter if you are from the US, Latin America, Europe or Asia, the documents that end up being selected for automation are often the same – or very similar. Based on our long-term experience with over 100 000 users in 5 continents, we know that while the specific documents that you will automate depend largely on the size of your firm, and the type of work you do, there are a lot of similarities. In another recent article, we discussed why steps to take when starting your automation process, and in yet another, calculating ROI for your automation project.  

But it’s still possible to understand automation as a bit of an abstract activity until you start to get your hands dirty. Here, we’ve selected three documents from our list, and combined them with our thoughts regarding steps you can take to make your automation successful, and provide some reasons why these documents make such good candidates for automation, or even for a first automation. 

The ground rules: 

For your first document, whatever you choose should:

• Brings good value from automation 
• Be content that your SMEs are very familiar and comfortable with
• Be content that SMEs can help you mark up 
• Documents should be standardized and approved with consistent styling 
• Documents should be reviewed beforehand to determine if multiple related documents may be logically combined into a single automated template.

Document Example 1:

Document Example 2:

Document Example 3:

We hope you’ve enjoyed our examples of documents that are good candidates for your first automation project. Want to know more about how Legito handles these automation projects? Contact us here to request a demo of our Smart Document Workspace.

As you may have read in one of our Industry Insights articles, it doesn’t matter if you are from the US, Latin America, Europe or Asia, the documents that end up being selected for automation are often the same – or very similar. Based on our long-term experience with over 100 000 users in 5 continents, we know that while the specific documents that you will automate depend largely on the size of your firm, and the type of work you do, there are a lot of similarities. In another recent article, we discussed why steps to take when starting your automation process, and in yet another, calculating ROI for your automation project.  

But it’s still possible to understand automation as a bit of an abstract activity until you start to get your hands dirty. Here, we’ve selected three documents from our list, and combined them with our thoughts regarding steps you can take to make your automation successful, and provide some reasons why these documents make such good candidates for automation, or even for a first automation. 

The ground rules: 

For your first document, whatever you choose should:

• Brings good value from automation 
• Be content that your SMEs are very familiar and comfortable with
• Be content that SMEs can help you mark up 
• Documents should be standardized and approved with consistent styling 
• Documents should be reviewed beforehand to determine if multiple related documents may be logically combined into a single automated template.

Document Example 1:

Document Example 2:

Document Example 3:

We hope you’ve enjoyed our examples of documents that are good candidates for your first automation project. Want to know more about how Legito handles these automation projects? Contact us here to request a demo of our Smart Document Workspace.

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The hard part is mathematical – making a business case/justification to purchase the software in the first place, and then quantifying the ROI on the investment at the end. Stating with confidence that “We need to buy this.” And then being able to say “This was a success because…” As anyone who’s ever tried to do this efficiently knows; it’s not a job for which doctoral degrees are offered, but one where they very much should be.

So what is a business analyst, project manager, and/or knowledge manager to do when looking to buy new or upgrade existing document assembly/contract lifecycle management (CLM) software? You know you need it, and your direct management may have even asked you to find suitable vendors, but how can you put that on “paper” in a way that makes sense to the business overall? How can you justify the expense, and prove that you were right?

At Legito, we see this issue on a daily basis, and have developed a simplified method to help you justify your expenditures and prove their worth – even if you don’t choose our Smart Document Workspace.

Step 0.1: First things first

The first question of any business expense is – is there a need for this in the first place? For the purposes of these calculations – presume there is. Most commonly this assumption can be applied because it’s been decided that your business DOES need this expense – either by those above you in the org chart, because you personally have become frustrated with applying the same changes to multiple documents, your IT team can’t make the changes fast enough in your existing – homegrown – document automation/management system, you find yourself drafting the same, repetitive documents (e.g. a scope of work, and employment agreement, etc.) over and over, or for several other reasons. What matters is that there is an assumption that this purchase will help the business.

Step 1: Where would this automation tool be used – e.g. what document would we end up automating?

For that, we’ve made a handy document automation matrix.

To establish some ground-rules at the outset of these calculations, there are documents that don’t really apply in this matrix. For example we are excluding documents like legal pleadings – for example a lawsuit – where it is necessary make a full accounting of the facts according to your client’s position requires a significant amount of free-form text, even if the descriptions of the relevant law or regulations and demand for relief can, in some ways, be automated. Of course, the settlement agreement for that case IS a good candidate for automation because many of the clauses/provisions are frequently the same, but key changes related to value, date, etc. are very important and require a LOT of time to make accurately.

For example a long document that’s used often and has many options for changes might be something like a commercial real-estate lease agreement if you are in the construction industry. Locations, time terms, values, certain provisions regarding the property itself, clauses related to building out the location for the lessor’s particular use, etc. all require optional text on top of an automated form of the general terms of the lease.

For a professional services firm, a scope of work, or an audit report could be a good example, or a law firm’s settlement agreement (as discussed above). Conversely, a great example of a short, rarely used document might be a client-specific memo regarding a very specific project which is not in the firm’s main line of business. The middle ground – between great candidates and pretty good candidates – will depend on your individual documents – e.g. size/frequency/complexity will vary by company, so give it some honest thought rather than skipping quickly through this step.

Now that we’ve established the broad strokes of what a document might be worth automating, let’s take a deeper dive into specific attributes.

For the table above, here’s how we will define each attribute:

• Long documents (or bundle of documents) = more than 8 pages
• Mid-size documents (or bundle of documents) = between 2 and 8 pages
• Short documents (or bundle of documents) = less than 2 pages
• Used often = document is drafted at least 100x per year
• Used occasionally = document is drafted between 20x and 100x per year
• Used rarely = document is drafted less than 20x per year
• Many options = more than 40 options or places for automatically inserted data
• Average amount of options = 4–40 options or places for automatically inserted data
• Few options = less than 4 options or places for automatically inserted data

This is a simplification of the concept, and there are additional factors that influence the viability of automating a document. These include translation (bilingual documents), mass generation (e.g. simultaneous notice of salary increase for 300 employees) or if your documents contain calculations (e.g. business offers or financial documents).

Step 2: The pick and shovel work starts

Now that you’re armed with a rough idea of the types of documents where you’ll be able to save time through document automation, it’s time to do some digging. As with anything where you want to justify your expense, it makes sense to do a thorough search in this step. Really take a hard look, because this will help to make your calculations more accurate and more likely to stand up to scrutiny after the project is complete.

Using your idea of what documents might be good candidates from Step 1, take a look at several recently created examples (10-20) of the documents you intend to automate. Don’t just take the first 20 documents and call it a day (unless you need to get the result tomorrow). Then look for changes that are repeatedly made and where these places exist within a document. The volume of changes, and the amount of time these changed texts occur will help you determine both whether your documents are good candidates like you think they might be, and later how much time you can save. The “Compare” feature in Word is a good way to spot these changes quickly.

Of course, if you already know what documents you’re going to need to automate, for example if you are looking to automate a specific set of documents by internal directive, you’re frustrated by a specific set of documents in your day-to-day, or you have a set test sample, you can skip this step.

Optional Step 3: Determine Un-automated drafting time

For those with no document automation solution at all, or for those looking for a set of data that identifies the value of an automation tool in the first place, it may be useful to identify the time spent on document drafting without automation. A great place to start is something like client billing records – where you might be able to determine that – for example, a large lease agreement takes 10 hours in drafting and review. Multiply that by the number of times the document is used per year and the end figure should give you a rough estimate of the time cost to complete the specific document.

Note, for the purposes of this calculation, we’re considering the original time cost to draft the clauses in the “original” or “base” version of the document as a sunk cost – and do not include it in the calculation process.

Step 3: Fire up the Calculator

With that starting point, let’s get to the investment costs of document automation tools:

Each automation starts with the creation of a template, which is then edited. As this is a new part of the automation implementation project, it’s not a sunk cost, so let’s put it into the calculation:

• Document Assembly: Time spent defining the Conditions and logical dependencies that power automation. How many different logically dependent / conditioned content and alternative wording options will be automated within the document.

• Document Lifecycle Management: Time spent developing automated Workflows and defining the proper User permissions and User Groups.

• Environment: Time spent preparing the Workspace (i.e., Branding, Footers, Categories, Document Groupings, etc.)

• On-Premise (if applicable, i.e, not using a cloud based solution): Time spent installing the solution and preparing it for use (e.g., servers, integrations, etc.)

Because Time = money, you will also want to apply a consistent billable time to each hour spent. If you’re a law firm, and you know who will do the automation, this is usually a fairly simple calculation. Outside of law, you might need to know salary information, which is usually confidential, so apply a consistent figure for each side of the equation.

Next, add the following costs:

– Software licence fees

– Outsourcing  costs if automation is not performed in-house

–Time spent training your employees (if done right, this can be a minor investment).

Step 4: Let’s look at some returns

Your return on investment (ROI) for document automation can mean reduced:

+ Time (and costs) spent drafting documents
+ Time spent on document administration (management)
+ Time spent reviewing documents
+ Risk of unauthorized changes in documents
+ Risk of human error in documents
+ Additionally, document automation also helps keep institutional knowledge easily accessible, making it easier  to onboard new employees

How much faster are documents drafted?

Best way to calculate these results is to research how much time it currently takes to draft different documents from various categories and multiply that number by the number of times it is drafted per year.  

For the purposes of your calculation, we suggest applying a 70% figure for time spent drafting documents. This is a fairly conservative estimate from our experience, but when projecting a change between existing time cost and expected savings from automation – a conservative estimate is better for several reasons – most to do with painting as “reasonable” a picture as possible for the business. And an accurate savings projection may be simply too complicated to develop at this stage. 

For a more realistic calculation you might also want to consider including savings from CLM and eSignature features. Averaging these three criteria can help you confidently create an estimate of your automation ROI. Legito’s custom ROI Calculator and Automation Matrix may give you a good starting place to reasonably estimate your expected ROI.

How much more efficient is your document lifecycle management?

Similar to calculating increased document drafting speed, determine the state of your current document lifecycle management processes, and also how much time is spent. Trial an automated document lifecycle management solution and capture how the time it takes to complete the same processes after automation. The difference is your time saved per process, which can then be expanded to include additional processes by multiplying that time by the frequency these lifecycle processes are activated.

How much time is saved using eSignature?

Like the above scenarios, it is possible to test the before and after state of your signing processes to determine time saved. Broadly, research has shown that a well deployed eSignature solution can decrease signing times by 95 percent.

Optional Step 5: Additional calculation inputs – The More the Merrier

Additionally, it makes sense to consider further advantages of document automation when you do your calculations – these are more difficult to determine at the beginning – when you are making projections – but are no less relevant.

For example, some factors you might want to consider when you calculate the final ROI of your document automation project include:

• Increased revenue from expanded time capacity (E.g “work expands to meet the available time – where automation gives time back to the team that can be used for more projects of the same nature), or Line of Business capacity where additional lines of business can be added because they are good candidates for document automation once the new tool has been implemented. This turns the project into a revenue generator, rather than a cost center. 
• Furthermore, you might want to include a calculation for reduced risk from outdated or un-approved texts within documents. While your company may not have a calculation for this, there are ways around it – including using the cost of past litigation, or uncollected revenue, delays in production, etc. 
• If you were really being expansive, you might want to consider costs you’ve retained as part of employee satisfaction – e.g. new employee onboarding is one benefit and discussed above, but retention of employees – who are freed from the tedium of manual document review and changes – is a legitimate financial benefit to the company. Your HR team can help you identify costs associated with hiring a new employee (or the cost of losing one).

An “Extra Bonus”

ROI calculations aren’t just an academic calculation that you keep around “just in case.” Large companies commonly deploy calculations of this nature to identify successful projects – as well as failures. Consider PwC – one of the largest professional services firms in the world.

In a recent webinar, PwC discussed some striking returns on investment from implementing document automation solutions in several of their largest offices, worldwide.

The double bonus

For those with very tight deadlines, or who just need a way to get a sense of what the concept looks like, you can always try the

quick calculator we created at Legito. 

Conclusion

Making a detailed business justification for expenses like purchasing a new document automation solution, and then demonstrating the success of the tool once implemented can be a daunting task and one that you shouldn’t take on lightly. But doing a reasonable level of ground work prior to starting to do calculations can help you both to make the case for purchasing the system at the beginning. This will make the secondary set of calculations easy – identifying how much you should be able to save, and the final set of calculations (how much did you actually save) and being able to estimate with reasonable and conservative certainty how much time you should be able to save through automation.

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Compliance – the process of making sure an organization is compliant with relevant laws and regulations wherever it does business, is an important part of any organization, because it helps to mitigate risk from non-compliant practices or documents within the organization itself. It is essential for anyone doing anything but the most basic of commerce. 

Compliance teams – which are often disproportionately responsible for a wide range of areas relative to their size and funding – face a daunting task in their day-to-day operations, and the presence or absence of an effective compliance team can have real-world effects on the business. The challenge of maintaining compliance is not just about making sure everyone knows not to violate relevant laws when, for example – interacting with subordinates, trading commodities or interest rate options, buying supplies, hiring staff, etc. But also in making sure each deal that is done, and each contract that is signed complies with relevant regulatory demands.

Compliance departments simply don’t have the human capital to scrutinize every contract that goes out the door, and no business would allow a bottleneck of this nature to appear in their contracting workflow. Conversely, compliance teams need to be free to do “real” work – analyzing and applying new legislative and regulatory measures, investigating complaints (should they arise), or dealing with compliance violations. It’s not an offhand question to wonder how to accomplish implementation of a compliance-first approach while maintaining the flow of the organization’s business without  interruption. So; how can it be done?

A simple, but elegant answer can be found in Document Automation and Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM). Automation and CLM  tools allow for the creation of templated documents, which contain language approved by the legal and compliance departments. These templates are then made available to the relevant contracting parties (for example sales, HR, procurement, trading, etc.) Because only a specific set of documents can be used for contracting, Compliance can be assured that the document begins its “life” with language that conforms to the demands of current legislation and regulation. While this may not seem like a major issue, remember that a company large enough to have more than one compliance team member is likely producing multiples of each document per day. If we start with only three documents, and there are at least three of those per day (at the absolute bare minimum), that’s 45 documents which need a fine-toothed review for compliance per week, the team is overwhelmed nearly immediately. Automating documents with approved language from the start saves this problem.

But the need for automation/CLM doesn’t end there. What does an organization do with its documents when a law changes or a new regulation appears? There are a set of automated, compliant templates that meet previous laws. Is it efficient to update each with new language by hand? Instead of doing find/replace with each text for each document, Automated documents can be updated as batches – and new, approved language can be entered ad pushed to each template from one location – a clause library  for example, saving vast amounts of time, and eliminating the risk of a non-compliant document – globally – with a few keystrokes.

Compliance and Document Automation/CLM are a match made in heaven. To find out more about how your compliance team can benefit from these tools, contact us for a demonstration.

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Automating your document doesn’t need to be a daunting project, or take excessive amounts of time. In fact, once you break it down into small steps, it’s actually relatively easy. Here are four easy-to-follow steps to help you along the way:

Step 1: Choose your Content

When starting out on a new project, you want to be selective about the first documents and processes you choose to automate. You can choose a simple document, or one that has the most business impact, either way: choose content that brings good value from automation, and content that your SMEs are very familiar and comfortable with, so they can easily provide guidance during the automation process. 

Step 2: Documents with style

It is essential to ensure that the documents that will be automated are prepared for automation. To make it easy to keep your original layout once you import it into your template builder, style your document. Create a Word document with all your company’s styles that you want to use in your templates (for numbered levels, unnumbered levels, bullets, … whatever you need). Assign each style to a text (clause) in this Word document (let’s call it a Style_library.docx). Create a new Template (eg. Style Library), import Style_library.docx with “Styles” and “Save imported Word as Advanced Layout Design” checked. The styling should be consistent across a suite of related documents if necessary, and should be reviewed beforehand to determine if multiple related documents may be logically combined into a single automated template. 

Step 3: Markup

Once you have prepared your content, the next step is for the Subject Matter Expert to provide the markup to the Template Author. A markup includes the rules, instructions, and guidance of how a document’s automations operate. How documents are marked up will vary, but should always follow a predefined process that can be used by all the project participants. Generally, document automation tools will provide a markup process. Legito, for example, provides one that allows for data points to be marked up, giving a significant head start in the automated template creation process when importing a document, provided it is marked up correctly. You can either use an in-house markup plan that you develop with your SMEs, or create one yourself. Just make sure to document it so that those who come after you will be able to use it/update it easily. 

Step 4: Review and Change Management

Once the markup has been provided, and the Template Author has created the template, the SME should review the automations and provide feedback. Allocate time for this SME review, and a clearly defined process put in place to manage change requests and the validation of updates. A best practice is to leverage an existing change management solution you have within your business. If you don’t have one, a simple spreadsheet in the cloud in solutions like Google Sheets, Excel in Office 365 or Smartsheet work well for collaboration on simple issue tracking. Finally, make sure to budget time for updates, and be prepared for company growth.

In planning your document automation project, you may have other business considerations and processes to put in place. Adapt to your specific needs and use these keys to success to have a great experience with your document automation solution and build your documents in a smarter way. You will love the results.

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Our recent webinar on Document Automation at PwC, hosted by Gary Eunson, Legito’s Chief Revenue Officers, features Ian Emond, Executive Director of Business Development, CEE and Mark Settle, President of Legito North America, and shows how Legito’s structured data approach to document automation makes it possible for PwC, one of the largest professional services firms in the world to save time and improve client experiences across multiple countries and business units.

Take a look today, and learn how to make your business thrive with Legito.

This week, we’re bringing you four new features, requested by our customers. Taken together, they are designed to make document assembly even faster, more efficient, and to better capture the essence of your original document design and formatting. 

Those new features are:

1) Repeated Elements

It’s now possible to repeat Elements in automated Templates the same way as clauses. If several neighbouring Elements are repeated the same way, they will be automatically repeated as a group.

Conditions for repeated items (“is last”, “is not last”, “is second to last”, etc.) can now be applied to repeated Elements.

2) Merge of Table Cells 

You can now merge Tables cells in Automated Template while retaining the conditional logic for the Table rows and columns.This means you can more closely follow the original format of your non-automated templates, or to format new tables in new documents.

Table cells can be merged by clicking on this icon:

The same way, table cells may be unmerged:

Conditions and repeats for rows and columns affected by merge cells are temporarily not available. 

We’ve also released two, smaller features which further improve your ability to automate and execute documents across a wide range of office locations. 

3) Enhanced Template Suite Favorite Settings

Template Suite Favorite Settings now contain information about languages.

4) Integration with flowSIGN

In addition to Legito BioSign and DocuSign integration, users can now use flowSIGN electronic signature from certSIGN to sign documents from the Legito Workspace.

More From New Releases

Service maintenance, which includes maintenance releases, enhancements, new versions, additions, and modifications to the Service, that it provides to all other customers under support for no additional fee.

Bug fixes to bring the Service into substantial conformance with its then-current user guide.

Response time in accordance with the chart below.

Resolution Process for Issues of Severity Levels 1 and 2:

1. Trouble Ticket opened.
2. Assign engineer to determine and correct the error.
3. Periodic reports on the status of the correction.
4. Initiate work to correct the error.

Scheduled Outages are usually scheduled during 2-5 a.m. (Server location time, e.g. Eastern Daylight Time for the US server) and customers are usually notified via email or in-application notification.

Service substantially fails to perform.

Response Goal: 1 hour

1. ​Trouble Ticket opened.
2. Assign engineer to determine and correct the error.
3. Periodic reports on the status of the correction.
4. Initiate work to correct the error.

Substantial degradation in performance of the Service.

Response Goal: 2 hours

1. ​Trouble Ticket opened.
2. Assign engineer to determine and correct the error.
3. Periodic reports on the status of the correction.
4. Initiate work to correct the error.

Minimal-to-no impact on the availability or performance of the Service.

Response Goal: 3 days

Principles

Applications that access the Legito API should adhere to the following principles:

• Don’t impersonate.
• Don’t surprise users.
• Respect the privacy of any information retrieved.
• Don’t overload users.

Additionally, your applications must adhere to Legito API rate limits (see the API Rate Limits section below).

Don’t Impersonate

• Your application should not mirror or replicate Legito, or any other organization using Legito.
• Do not impersonate or facilitate impersonation of others in a manner that can mislead, confuse, or deceive users.
• End users should understand that your application is integrated with Legito but is an independent resource.
• You should not remove or alter any proprietary notices in the Legito API.

Don’t Surprise Users

Your application should not…

• Use the Legito API for different purposes other than what your application states or implies.
• Confuse or mislead users about the source or purpose of your application.
• Use business names and/or logos in a manner that can mislead, confuse, or deceive users.
• Use the Legito API on behalf of any third-party.
• Facilitate or encourage the publishing of links to malicious or obscene content.

Your service should outline what actions your application will take on the user’s behalf as part of the application registration process.

Respect the Privacy of any Information Retrieved

• Any user information—including course enrollments, grades, profile information, etc.—retrieved through the Legito API should be considered private information and, in some cases, will be protected by government regulations.
• Know what information your tool will disclose to the public or to other products and services, and be clear with end users about what information will be disclosed.
• Do not facilitate or encourage the publishing of private or confidential information.
• Respect the intellectual property rights of others.

Don’t Overload Users

Legito provides a number of different ways to contact, notify, and inform users of information. Where these methods are exposed in the Legito API, it’s important to monitor how often your application is pushing information to users.

In general, you should try to push information as rarely as possible, both to prevent user annoyance and also to make your pushes more effective.

API Rate Limits

Applications that access the Legito API must not place undue load on Legito servers. Legito has an automatic rate limiting provision that dynamically adjusts as more concurrent and/or expensive requests occur. When the rate limit is exceeded, API requests will fail. Rate limiting is enforced per user access token so that partners who perform requests on behalf of multiple end users will not be throttled per developer access token that they hold.

If an application regularly exceeds the API rate limits or uses a disproportionately large number of high-impact (e.g. non-GET) requests, the access tokens may be revoked, or other measures may be taken to ensure the stability of the system for all users.

If you are concerned about hitting the rate limit, please contact your Customer Success Manager to either adjust your rate limit or seek assistance optimizing your application for lower impact on Legito performance.

Deprecation and API Changes

The Legito API is versioned to allow for future enhancements. Legito strives to deliver a platform that is stable, consistent, and secure so you can confidently build awesome on top of Legito APIs. Legito will add, change, and remove API endpoints and fields from time to time using commercially reasonable efforts to provide communication as indicated in the API documentation.

Modifications to Policy

Legito reserves the right, in its sole discretion, to modify this Legito API Policy at any time. You are responsible for reviewing and becoming familiar with any modifications. Modifications are effective when first posted. To receive notifications about changes to this policy and the Legito API functionality, see the Legito API documentation.

Instructure has no liability to Customer as a result of any change, temporary unavailability, suspension, or termination of access to the API.

Information and notices regarding Legito APIs can be found in the Legito New Releases section.

API Support

Developers on cloud-hosted Legito can submit questions about or issues with the API to the Legito Support team in one of the following ways:

• Email helpdesk@instructure.com
• Open the Error Report form and identify any API error you have encountered in Legito

Tickets about the Legito API will be handled following the same service-level agreement that applies to any other ticket from a given institution.

Fans of Legito’s “Weekly Automation Corner” as well as those who have spent the time to seriously investigate implementing a document automation or Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) solution knows the typical benefits of these tools – reduced drafting time, elimination of clerical errors/risk for the organization, less review time, etc. And these continue to be the major reasons to adopt automation/CLM tools. But did you know that there are other, hidden benefits you might not be aware of? 

There are, and they actually have real-world implications rather than just being the office hero for finding a great new tool. Here are a few: 

Employee retention

How can a document automation/CLM tool improve employee retention? It’s pretty simple actually: Our employees, be they junior, senior, partner, associate, or administrator live in a digital world, where they are used to working from mobile devices, having connected apps, and having the ability to seamlessly complete tasks. These employees demand the same functionalities from their work environments. When they don’t get them, they leave. Of course, other factors can have an effect as well, but Automation/CLM tools give them the functionality they want and prevent laborious drudgery in manual document assembly. Happy employees mean less turnover, more productivity, less institutional knowledge leaving the company, and less time and money spent finding new ones. 

Ease of Use

Another hidden benefit is ease of use. We already know our employees are digitally savvy, and are used to having easy-to-use apps available at their fingertips. Gone are the days when they were willing to go through every standard contract and update the language of (for example) the personal data section of each version. Now they want the ability to make that change across all documents, at one time, from one place and have them carry forward across all templates, and all documents. This helps retain employees by freeing them from tedious tasks, but also reduces hassle of making sure all documents are updated – and yes; risk to the company. 

“Human” errors protection (alternative version)

As any junior legal associate will tell you, there is a constant fear of missing something that needs to be updated when a contract’s terms change, and an equal sense of euphoria that comes from finding that the “other side” missed something. Document Automation/CLM is the junior associate’s secret weapon against being caught having missed something – no matter how hard they try. 

Data Analytics 

Data isn’t just for the accounting, marketing, or product departments anymore. As businesses grow, there is a renewed reliance on data across teams means those who deal with document assembly will need to be ready as well – from lawyers to accountants to procurement teams. Need to know the most frequently used documents? Frequently used clauses? Documents that present the most institutional risk from outdated or missing language? Most common bottlenecks in workflows? Here again automation/CLM solutions are up to the task. 

Document automation or Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) solutions bring well-known, as well as hidden benefits that are no less important. What benefits will you see when you implement an automation/CLM solution?

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Automation – or document automation/assembly is the process of automating the process of creating a document – be it a contract, a form, a proposal, etc. In general, the process involves text inputs (from various sources – text files (Microsoft Word, Google docs, in some cases scanned files, etc., or software-lead user interviews) which are then used to create a template which is automated, with changes to certain sections applied throughout the document in the relevant places.

Legal documents – e.g. those produced by lawyers/law firms are a great example of a place where automation fits nicely, but there’s a good chance your last rental agreement, mortgage, or your employment documents at work (for example) were automated as well. There are whole industries that rely on automation, including accounting/professional services, financial services, consulting, insurance, etc., because it gives them the advantage of dramatically cutting the time and potentially risk associated with free-hand edits to higher volumes of the same document. 

But has automation technology reached peak efficiency? Are there problems with the way automation is done “today” that can be improved on? Is there something out there that will move the process forward and allow those who rely on automated documents to do more, faster, with even less risk? In short, yes.

A word about Word

As new technologies are developed or applied in new places, common technology can present a limitation that prevents advancement. In document automation, the problem is that documents are often automated based on Microsoft Word files. While Word is a widely adopted word-processing tool worldwide, when Word documents form the technical basis of automated documents, they create limitations that hold users back.

Word documents do have some things that make them popular. Word is familiar. Many businesses use it. It’s understood by people without experience in document automation. Using Word in document automation also allows for commonly used visual styles. 

But, where Word is the backbone for the automation process, the automated documents are at the mercy of what Word can do – especially where the automation tool is an add-in to Word itself. While Word does words (obviously) well, it doesn’t treat those words as data in a way that makes it the ultimate solution for document automation. 

Work has moved to data

Automating Word documents is technology that’s been in use for many years, and doesn’t meet the current realities of today’s work environment. Those realities have long ago embraced data, the ability to manipulate it and make it work for us and manage it according to our needs. Remember that while “data” is numbers – website visits, costs, dates; there are other types of data that you might not have thought of. Addresses are data, contract parties are data, commodities; even equipment lists are data. The template used in document automation itself is data. So a document automation software that doesn’t allow for the  automation, manipulation, and management of all the data in our documents, including the template that houses it, holds the user back.

Using Word as the basis for a document automation tool is like trying to travel on horseback. You can get around, and you can get around “better” by getting a faster, more agile horse. But you’re still traveling on horseback. 

Just as horses have been replaced, so too are Word markups in automation. First, the car that put the horse out to pasture, and then the airplane is putting the car back in the garage for more than a short trip. 

Document automation has been able to leave the horse, skip the car, and go straight to air travel. How? 

Structured Data

Structured data provides the backbone that allows those that use it to move light years ahead of their competitors. 

Before we get further, let’s clarify a couple of things at this point. First, Word – as a means of inputting text into a structured data format is common when using documents. The issue is not between the file types (Word vs. something else) but Word as the backbone for document automation: e.g. applying word processing technology to automation/assembly. Furthermore, the ability to export a templated document or “finished work product” to a Word document format is not the issue that we are tackling here. It’s the attempt to to manage, manipulate, analyze, and work with an automated document using Word and its marked-up documents vs. structured data – before it’s exported into the user’s preferred final format.

What is structured Data?

Structured data is very simply a way to classify the data in a document. As discussed above, “data” means not just numbers, but words as well. 

Those data points are then categorized in a database where each value is organized according to a really specific set of values and descriptions with their own distinct ID. For example, the type of wheat in a commodities contract has a different value from the processing of the wheat, which has a different value from the weight being purchased, the party doing the buying, the selling, and then how it is consigned to the shipper. The data is organized into neat tables and is easy to interact with using common database interaction methods, like the SQL language. Then the individual document templates themselves are treated as data, which is itself categorized – in contrast to a unique file like you would have if you were working with Word-based templating tools. 

For those with a technical background who are saying to themselves that nearly everything (including document automation with Word) uses structured data to some extent, we’re talking about using structured data for the full document automation process, not just parts or sections of the technical process behind the automation. 

How does structured data benefit document automation?

Structured data is the best way to interact with information. As opposed to semi-structured and unstructured data. Coincidentally unstructured data – textual documents made of sequences of words – is both common (websites, etc) and the source files when trying to automate a Word document. It is “best” because it allows the data to be easily and quickly utilized across multiple text fields, or even multiple templates themselves, for faster drafting, automation, global change management, and even copying whole templates themselves, as we will discuss in more detail below.  

Structured data in document automation; a real-world example

For a practical picture of what this means, let’s borrow from Google – discussing categorizing words as structured data – the very thing that happens with automation solutions based on structured data: 

“[F]or example, on a recipe page, what are the ingredients, the cooking time and temperature, the calories, and so on… Because the structured data labels each individual element of the recipe, users can search for your recipe by ingredient, calorie count, cook time, and so on.” 

While Google is talking about search page results, and how it categorizes the information it finds, the same applies to document automation. Each part of a document is categorized according to a specific set of parameters. For example, instead of a clause being simply a clause of text, it now becomes a set of combined data – clause names, dates, parties, values, etc. are all categorized, and commonly recognized across not just the document itself, but the rest of the documents in your workspace. So if you want to find all of the non-compete clauses in all of your documents – across all of your templates and workspaces, or all the times you’ve dealt with a particular supplier, or every place that a payment is due on, for example, the 17th of September, the tool you’re using is able to recognize that. 

The benefits aren’t only related to the ability to find information across documents, or even to analyze various types of clauses or features within a document set. 

The benefits of structured data for document automation

Structured data provides three broad categories of benefits:

Extensibility

Structured data allows the document automation solution to grow as the user’s needs do, so more types of documents and more types of complex documents can be automated. This means that users don’t end up hitting the limitations of the document automation tool, so there are more projects, more varied projects, clients, and lines of business that can be taken on because structured data allows them to do more complex things with the document because of how it handles the information. This leads to greater efficiency, unit economics of the work product, and at the same time reduces risk across the board, especially for complicated projects. And while a document automation solution based on structured data doesn’t automatically generate more revenue, it can certainly contribute. 

Flexibility/Power

Automation tools that are based on mark-ups of Microsoft word files are limited by what Word allows them to do. Structured data makes for a much more powerful tool because it offers the flexibility to do more without the limitations of third party tools. 

More powerful solutions create more flexibility to meet client needs, in ways that wouldn’t be possible with limitations inherent in tools that rely on Word. Follow-on benefits include reduced 3d party license costs, reduced costs from cloud hosting, etc.

Longevity

Longevity is the “secret” benefit of structured data, and is a direct result of the extensibility and flexibility/power that structured data-based solutions offer. Buying and implementing software, but especially document automation/CLM software has historically been a long, complicated process that takes time both before and after the deal is done. Because solutions that deploy structured data throughout the whole document assembly/automation process – to the full document template – maintain their power and grow with users, without limitation, there is no need to replace it after two or three years when your team outgrows it. 

This longevity creates tangible cost savings both in real money from additional license fees for new software, and in company-wide time savings in time to buy, implement, train, and adopt new, more advanced systems as each is outgrown – which cannot and should not be overlooked when making software purchasing decisions. Finally, frequent changes in an organization can have a negative impact on employee morale. Because there is a reduction in time cost and a reduction in change, employees retain morale, which has follow-on effects in savings from employee retention.

Do I need to have a document automation solution based on structured data? 

Is there a reason to waive off all of these advantages and stick with a Word-based automation tool? There are always reasons to do nothing. If you do an exemplary job but don’t expect your customers to have the faith in you to ask for anything more complicated. Or if you don’t want to take on more business, or if you have very specific document needs that everyone in your team knows (and again, don’t have to expand from, or train anyone else on the existing system.) 

For the rest of the world, upgrading to an automation solution that deploys structured data rather than relying on Word documents as a backbone can have significant benefits. 

Conclusion

To bring it back around, does Structured data solve some of the challenges presented by Word-document based automation tools?

Yes

Structured data permits the management, manipulation, etc. of the full document automation template, rather than just parts of it. Thus, more complex documents can be automated because the data can be more finely manipulated, and conversely a relatively simple document can still be manipulated in a more finite way. To carry forward Google’s recipe example, if the recipe is for a hamburger, then you’re making it with a microwave oven if you’re using Word-based document automation. Structured data allows you to make the type of burger you would see on a cooking show, or to have ultimate control over the heat, utensils, technique, etc. 

As discussed above, this added ability allows for those who use structured data to take on more, more complex, and likely more lucrative automation projects, increasing their flexibility to meet customer/client needs, and structured data adds longevity that means you don’t have to go through the hassle of buying automation software and training your team on the new tool after only a couple of years. 

So where can you find a document automation/CLM solution that’s based on structured data? Where can you start the process of getting this for your team? Do you want to see how structured data works when applied to the full process of document automation and contract lifecycle management? 

Look no further than Legito. Contact us. 

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