JANUARY 2025 | 61 THE OKLAHOMA BAR JOURNAL deliverable), then DA can dramatically boost profitability and/or decrease costs. Let’s repeat. It would be normal to compress the drafting of a document from six hours of an attorney’s time to 15 or 20 minutes. Boost profitability. Decrease costs. FASTER, CHEAPER, BETTER Another point is this increased productivity should also result in a higher-quality legal work product. Some lawyers could negatively react to this statement, as a lawyer’s goal is to turn out a perfect work product. But mistakes are sometimes made. For example, if you start with a prior work product document that was similar, you can use copy and paste to change the prior client’s name to the new client’s name. But if you copy and paste multiple times, it is possible to miss one. It would be embarrassing to send a document to a client or opposing counsel with a former client’s name in the document. It is not a good look on several levels. Some of you may respond that Word’s find and replace function should handle this, and it may do a better job. But it is not flawless and may miss things. For example, if your document has a space in the middle of a word or a misspelling, find and replace will miss that. Starting with a prior work product instead of a template may also result in additional provisions being included that should not be used in the current situation. DO-IT-YOURSELF? If someone in the office had the ability and inclination, this could be a viable but challenging do-it-yourself project. But if you have done little yet with the free available Word automation tools (e.g., macros, Quick Parts, customized templates), you likely are not going to dive into a major document automation project on your own. I reached out to Mr. Henley for some thoughts about DIY Word automation. He said a good rule of thumb was that the project would probably take five times the investment of time than one would estimate. He also indicated that many people create far too many templates. For example, just because you have four types of family trusts you might create, you do not want four templates. Rather, you would prefer one trust template that changes the subsequent interview questions as you answer preliminary ones to generate the documents you need for this situation.
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