COMPARED TO some law firms, Pinsent Masons were late adopters of document assembly. Having started, however, our document assembly offering has taken off and just over two years from launching the first automated precedent to the lawyers for everyday use, Pinsent Masons now has over 300 automated precedents and reports being used throughout the firm.

The benefits of document assembly are numerous. Most importantly it means we can serve our clients better by producing consistently high quality documents in a fraction of the time it would have taken previously. The lawyers enjoy being able to prepare first draft contracts and reports in minutes and then have more time to concentrate on the skilled work the clients are actually paying for. Other benefits include reducing the risk of human error by ensuring consistency in drafting and also providing certainty in setting fixed fees.

In this article, I will explain what I consider to be the key ingredients that have helped Pinsent Masons successfully roll out document assembly and which, applied together, should create a 'Recipe for Success' with any document assembly project. I refer to these key ingredients as the five Ps: Product, Pilot, Plan, People and Promotion. I will also touch on some pitfalls to avoid based on our experiences and mention some potential future uses of document assembly.

So who am I and why am I writing this article? I joined Pinsent Masons 6 years ago as a newly qualified solicitor into the Real Estate Group. I was 3 years qualified when the property market crashed. We were all encouraged to consider how we could improve our working practices to make us more efficient. The partners undertook listening exercises with both clients and fee-earners to improve the way we delivered our services. One of the initiatives the firm looked into at this point was document assembly. We undertook a benchmarking exercise as to all of the software products available on the market to help us choose the right software for our firm and this is my first key ingredient, 'Product', or, if you like, finding the right tool for the job.

Having spoken to several other firms about their experiences with document assembly, we invited the main vendors of document assembly software to pitch their products. Based on this due diligence, we chose Business Integrity's 'Contract Express'. Business Integrity is one of the market leading document assembly providers and I have found their software instinctive and easy to use, as well as being impressed with their support service.

The next thing to consider was how to use it and start automating our precedents. This is where my second and third key ingredients come in, The 'Pilot' and the 'Plan'.

The UK Real Estate group was chosen to pilot document assembly. Three fee-earners, including me, and one PSL, were chosen to go on secondment for two months to automate as many of Real Estate's generic precedents as possible. We were led by a partner and a senior PSL. Business Integrity came into our offices, helped place the software on our server and gave us all two days' training.

We spent a lot of time at this early stage working out best practice, considering how we could all work on different documents but keep a consistent approach. I have since learnt that consistency is important from an efficiency point of view as the more fee-earners come to recognise questionnaires, the quicker they work through them.

We also had to consider how we would deal with learning and guidance and how we would test the questionnaires and automated documents produced thoroughly. Finally, we considered the brand and what we were actually 'giving' to fee earners; for that reason called the platform for the questionnaires 'Precedents Express' and branded them to match the look and feel of our firm's intranet pages.

We all picked up the authoring quickly. I sometimes refer to the preparation of the questionnaires from a Word document as 'coding' but the software allows you to create the questionnaires from a Word template and the code is plain English. I really enjoyed the authoring aspect and my inner geek quickly came out of the closet. I loved algebra at school and applying these rules, layering them up and considering all the possible permutations was, to me, just like doing algebra all day.

In the first few months the four of us managed to automate six key precedents and we launched these to the Real Estate Group in England. The feedback was incredible. Fee-earners immediately saw the benefits and found the questionnaires instinctive and easy to use. They were encouraged to make suggestions for improvements and identify new documents to automate. Suddenly in the English Real Estate Group alone, demand was high and the lawyers had a long request list of precedents to be automated.

I approached the firm and asked if I could extend my secondment to work on these additional documents for the Real Estate group. As time went on the automation sped up considerably. After six months I had coded almost all of Real Estate's generic precedents. Rather than the firm then having to find the resource within every department to run similar projects and having the lead up time all over again, I left fee-earning for good and joined the Central Knowledge team to roll out document assembly to the rest of the firm.

We concluded the pilot phase by sending a survey around our Real Estate lawyers. Waiting for the survey results felt like waiting for my exam results day but thankfully the feedback was great with 93% of lawyers stating that they would recommend Precedents Express to a colleague, the other 7% having not had a reason to use the system yet.

The results of this pilot made it fairly easy to 'sell' document assembly to the other groups throughout the firm. We had a feature in our internal magazine about the benefits of document assembly and used some of the statistics and quotes from the pilot.

Two years on, we have now automated over 300 precedents and suites of documents. The majority of the groups within the firm now have at least a few automated precedents.

My next key ingredient is 'People'. There are quite a few different thoughts and models regarding resourcing your document assembly project. Some firms have trained all of their PSLs to use the software and they maintain the precedents and questionnaires themselves. The benefit of this approach is that the questionnaires are worked on by practice specific experts and updates may be turned around faster. However, my personal view on this is that too many cooks spoil the broth and this approach threatens consistency, you risk reinvention of the wheel and the automation can get pushed to the bottom of the PSL's long to do list. Departments with limited PSL resource also need to be considered.

Some firms automate their precedents from within their IT department. If using this model, I suggest you have someone project managing and ensuring good communication between IT, the fee-earners and the partners. IT could easily do the authoring but they may not be the right people to present to fee-earners and to "sell' the product. Equally, they may not wish to judge priority or feel it is their role to produce financial reports.

I think part of our success came from using fee-earners on the initial pilot, and I continued with the project having only recently been at the coal face myself. I knew our systems, I knew the pressures junior fee-earners were under, I understood time recording and fixed fees and was able to liaise between all of the stakeholders. In terms of buy-in and automating the right documents quickly, I think this was key.

As demand has grown, so has the Precedents Express team. The benefits have become more obvious and the time savings have increased. I now work with a team of three Legal Knowledge Engineers. They are all recent Law or LPC graduates with exceptional IT skills. Being of the Facebook generation, they have great ideas as to how to improve the systems and the interface and are encouraged daily to put these forward.

Another model you may want to consider is to employ the skills of a consultant or contractor to kick start your project. Equally, you could consider buying the coded templates off the shelf. LexisNexis, for example, have automated generic precedents using Business Integrity's Contract Express software. With either of these options, you do need to consider maintenance and how that will be charged for and work in practice.

When considering the people you need, think about the legal engineers, the knowledge providers, the project manager and whether you want to use contractors or consultants. Finally, consider the senior member of the firm, the Project Sponsor; the one who has your Project Manager's back if he or she is being told by four different partners to automate their documents by yesterday.

The fifth key ingredient is 'Presentation'. This is the differentiator.

As with any change in working practice or new product roll out, particularly to sceptical, busy lawyers, selling and communicating the positive benefits of a new system, working on buy-in and encouraging feedback and ideas are essential. This can include firm-wide communications, board level sponsorship, updates, surveys and requests for ideas.

There are some remaining traditionalists who are afraid of technology. With these fee-earners, a quick on- to-one demonstration is usually enough for them to be converted, particularly when they realise how easy it is to use, just like booking flights on line.

However, the main selling point is time savings, resulting in improved client service, a greater competitive edge and increased profitability.

It depends on the size of your firm and the number of lawyers using the precedents, but we have calculated that we achieved return on investment within year one.

The main pitfall to avoid is not to run before you can walk. Do not tackle your longest, most complicated, precedents first. Start with short, simple, regularly used precedents such as licences. If you take on a suite of long complicated precedents, your resource will be consumed for a long period of time when you could be using them to save the firm more time by automating lots of shorter documents.

Secondly, avoid over-engineering. Always consider 'benefit' to the firm as a whole and to your overall strategy. Give your resource authority to prioritise, they should be managing and driving an important work stream for your firm and should not be simply a support team for the lawyers. Finally, bear in mind that the knowledge providers or your PSLs, who will be providing the legal questions to automate the precedents, may feel as though their legal know how and drafting is under the microscope. Time can be wasted agonising over the dotting of Is and crossing of Ts in guidance notes for example, when the questionnaire could be launched to fee-earners to use.

There is plenty you can think about doing next with document assembly but once your base precedents have been automated, creating 'suites' is a logical next step.

The software allows us to prepare entire suites of documents that lawyers can draft by simply answering one online questionnaire. An example of one of our suites is a lease suite. By ticking a couple of extra boxes upon completion of the questionnaire as well as getting the draft lease, if required a rent deposit deed, a licence for alterations, a guarantee agreement, notices, statutory declarations and a draft lease summary are also produced ready to be reviewed, bespoked and sent to the tenant's solicitors.

Future projects could include linking the software with other systems, client facing applications, non-legal documents or reporting.

In summary, think about your Product, Pilot, Plan, People and Promotion and you should quickly see that document assembly is a no brainer.

By Catherine Bamford, Senior Legal Knowledge Engineer for Pinsent Masons.