Doug Cornelius .com

A few weeks ago I posted my review of DocStoc, a user generated community where you can find and share professional documents. My biggest complaint was that it was full of amateurish information and copywritten materials. DocStoc was sponsoring a contest for who could post the most documents. There was a flood of documents. One winner published more than 20,000 documents. But the focus was on quantity, not quality.

DocStoc changed their course and are now having a contest for the best quality document uploaded each day. That sounds like a much better goal.

I created a DocStoc account and uploaded some documents. Here is my account profile.

But what’s in it for me? Why should I contribute documents and maintain my documents?

I keep looking for functionality that would make it easier to categorize and maintain my documents and other documents that interest me. DocStoc would be more useful if it offered features and information that I could not easily find elsewhere. I was hoping that DocStoc offered at least some basic document management features. If I worked in a small firm, I might want to use DocStoc to host my form documents. And maybe I would want to combine my forms from others that I found useful. DocStoc could have a been a better place to host this over my hard drive or a shared file server.

DocStoc does not offer much in the way of document management features. I can’t edit the document once its in there. I can’t even delete any of my documents.

With any knowledge management project, enterprise 2.0 project or web 2.0 site, I believe you need to focus on giving the person a useful tool, rather than having the focus on the collective good that comes from using the tool. People should use the tool because it is useful for them individually. Not because they can win an iPod if they use it the most. You need to be able to answer the questions: “What’s In It For Me?”

With DocStoc, it could be a wonderful tool if people contributed and maintained their best documents on the site. There is a lot of collective good. But for me as an individual user, the tool does not provide me personally with much benefit. There is not much in it for me.

I saw DocStoc a few weeks ago and dismissed it. It seems to gathered a little more traction since the post by Matt Homann on the [non]billable hour: A You-Tube for Legal Docs? Check out DocStock.

Matt calls it the “You-Tube of legal documents.” I think that it a correct assessment since I found it to be full of amateur information and copywritten materials.

For instance, I pulled up the Real Estate Purchase Contract. It is clearly stolen from the California Association of Realtors form of Purchase Agreement and Escrow Instructions. Copyright violation

I went on to the form Promissory Note. That one is embarrassingly bad.

Most of the posters are anonymous or an avatar. (I found the prolific FreeRealEstate person.) that does not give you any confidence in whether the agreement maybe good or bad. They are running a promotion that gives away an iPod Touch to the user who uploads the most documents each week. That is a great way to create quantity, not quality. I found an iPod winner in Farhan Khan who uploaded over 20,000 documents. It looks like he also just uploaded his hard drive. I do not know him, but I am not going assess any value to someone who uploaded that many “professional documents” and just finished his MS in computer science this year.

Document assembly is a powerful tool that we are starting to deploy across my firm. Document assembly is a wonderful and powerful knowledge management tool. We recently deployed HotDocs Server.

I found the desktop version of HotDocs to be powerful, but a pain in the neck to install, maintain and train attorneys on how to use. Going the route of the server made deployment easy. Users just need a web browser to access the templates, answers the questions and assemble the documents.

The problem with HotDocs server was that they sold it without a front end, expecting the customer to custom-build the user interface. Last year, HotDocs came out with their Template Portal product to act as the user interface for the portal. This allowed us to open the box and deploy the server in a week. Most of that time was spent changing to the colors and graphics to match our intranet.

One issue I had with the Template Portal is that it presents all of the templates in a flat list. I wanted to seamlessly integrate it with our intranet and forms library. So instead of opening the form of deed in word, you get the HotDocs interview taking you through the conveyance process. We found a workaround. We found the Template Sets feature created a distinct URL for the template, allowing us to link directly to the HotDocs interview.

Barron Henley and Blair Janis wrote an article for the Best of ABA TECHSHOW: Abracadabra: Document Creation You Can Really Use. They do a great job of taking you through the process and touting the benefits of document assembly.

The problem I have is dealing with changes to the documents and managing the client. Any good form document should change as market conditions change, the law changes and client expectations change. Inevitably, the client wants to see the changes and approve them before they get into the form, or the client wants to send a set of forms out to a potential recipient to give them a flavor of the documents. The problem is that the form is full of the document coding, making it hard to understand what is happening with the document.

To counter this, I have starting setting up the templates with a form option. This option pre-selects some of the answers and produces a form for distribution. It is kind of kludgy but is solving the problem for now.

hotdocs
document assembly
document assembly

With my current fascination with wikis, I wondered if you could use one to draft a legal agreement. No, I thought. That’s just crazy.

Well someone is crazier than me. Tractis.com has set up a library of legal agreements, using wikis to draft them. They have also layered on document management and signature tracking.

Like a good crash test dummy, I signed up and used one of their templates to draft a Non-Disclosure Agreement [Free Registration Required]. Feel free to edit my agreement. Interesting exercise, but I do not think I will be drafting agreements this way.

But individual clauses for agreements? That could done with a wiki.

I have a leasing clause library sitting in a folder in my document management system. I have been toying with the idea of putting each clause into a separate wiki page. You could add a description of uses for the clause, issues to watch out for and links to other related clauses.

I should warn you that Tractis is a Spanish company and most of the agreements are in Spanish. Despite several years of people trying to teach me Spanish, I can’t do much with it except to point out that my pencil is yellow.

Thanks to Matt Homann for pointing this out.
the [non]billable hour: Web 2.0 Replaces Lawyers Again?

Are lawyers ready for real-time document collaboration? Brett Burney thinks they are: Time for Lawyers to Collaborate in Real Time.

I do not agree. Drafting documents in a transaction is much more about negotiation than collaboration. I want to control drafting and control a negotiation posture.

Mr. Burney mentions using WebEx and other online meetings as a way to collaborate. I have done that a few times, but it is hard to find the right situation. For a big document, nobody wants to be going through the document line by line.

The situation is a little different when trying draft forms and templates. A collaboration model would fit better for an internal discussion or drafting session without the need for a negotiation stance. The collaboration software puts an artificial amount of technology in the way of a thoughtful discussion about the document.

Ken Adams had an interesting analysis on this Wiki, Anyone? on using a wiki and other software to draft contracts. He concludes that a wiki is not likely to be a factor in contract drafting. I agree.

AdamsDrafting: Real-Time Document Collaboration

Darryl Mountain published an article on document assembly Disrupting conventional law firm business models using document assembly in the International Journal of Law and Information Technology.

He identifies three barriers to the adoption of document assembly: 1. Shortage of Right People, 2. Inadequate Capital and 3. Rules against the Unauthorized Practice of law. Although his article is about externally facing document assembly being made available to the public, I think the same barriers exist for internally facing document assembly products.

1. Shortage of the Right People: For a successful and sustainable document assembly process you need both a technology person for the programming and a legal person for legal expertise. The legal person will need to tolerate the technology limitations, the intrusion of the logic tree and business process on the form documents. The technology person will need to understand the legal needs and anticipate the legal business process. Both of these type of people are few and far between in a law firm.

2. Inadequate Capital. It is difficult to identify the documents that it is worth investing the resources into to automate. The simplest (i.e. shortest documents) are generally the first to be automated. As the documents get longer and more complicated, harder decisions need to be made about the choice of language and decision-making process to achieve the right language. This is where many automation projects fall aside. Attorneys lose interest as the choices made no longer match the choices they would make. I have found the most successful projects to be those focused on a particular client, where a senior partner can force the decisions on those working for his client.

3. Rules Against the Unauthorized Practice of Law. For external document assembly this is the biggest issue. For software vendors, this is largely insurmountable. For law firms making the legal knowledge available through document assembly, this opens them to malpractice claims from unknown individuals. For internal document assembly, there is a similar concern that an attorney without the substantive knowledge will misuse the document assembly program, opening the law firm to malpractice. From a technology standpoint this can be controlled through security. But one should also point out that an individual attorney misusing a document assembly product would otherwise be uncovering a random form or precedent from another knowledge system. The document assembly package can be used to better steer the attorney in the right direction, give better advice and point them to who they need to talk to.