In these earlier posts I set out 7 Key questions for in-house lawyers considering if document automation could help your organisation, and 8 ways document automation could help your in-house team.

In this post I look at 6 types of documents which your organisation is likely to produce regularly, and how they can benefit from automation:

• procurement documents
• agreements for supply of goods and services
• property documents
• employment agreements and related documents
• checklists
• company secretarial documents

  1   Procurement documents

Procurement is an area that gets a lot of criticism, as it can be hard to quickly prepare all the documents that are required throughout a procurement process and to ensure that the right information is included at every stage to make it clear what is required for successful outcomes.  One procurement team leader recently told me that he and his team spend 75% of their week on document drafting and revision.

However, by looking at the whole process it is possible to see how information should flow from one document to the next, to ensure consistency and greatly speed up the process, so the parties involved can spend more time and less money focussing on successful selection and delivery, and less time on paperwork.

You can see some of the LawHawk procurement documents - which are mainly based off the Government's RFx and GMCs - here. These documents demonstrate how fast and easy it can be to generate really customised documents. They contain many options and are great for where you don't already have your own set of documents.  However, where automation can really come into its own is when you have your own set of documents, that are already consistent and have fewer options, and you can focus on custom automation to make the process as fast and consistent as possible.

2   Agreements for supply of goods and services

Many organisations maintain multiple precedents in this area e.g. long form/short form, buyer/customer/balanced, IT/Non-IT.  With automation you can combine these into a single document with questions that control which options are included.  All the right text is inserted or removed, with 100% consistency, at the simple click of a button.  If you change your mind, you can come back and change the answer, and all the consequential changes occur immediately - there is no need to start fresh with a different template.

Rather than try and enforce a "one size fits all" approach, you can give your users more flexibility to deal with all the usual negotiation points that will come up.  They can have a menu of options around things like IP ownership, limitations of liability and insurance that they can select from - with tailored guidance to help them understand why each option is there, and when it should be used.

3  Property documents

Many property documents, such as deeds of renewal and rent review, assignment or surrender can be completed in only a few minutes with automation. 

In addition to generating the piece of paper, you can also use automation to enforce compliance with key processes. For example you can build confirmations into the questionnaire that the user has reviewed the lease, ensured all obligations have been met, inspected the premises and will update any relevant property registers etc.

4  Employment agreements and related documents

LawHawk has prepared a very comprehensive employment agreement, which can cater for almost any type of employment situation.  However, your organisation will not require all of those options as you will already have decided on a narrower set of options that may be offered.  The existing LawHawk questionnaire can be easily adapted to your simpler agreement by removing the questions that are not relevant, leaving only those that are, and tailoring the guidance to meet your requirements. 

Your organisation could be able to prepare an employment agreement that still contains a number of optional details in as little as 60 seconds. 

You could automate the whole process, using the same information to generate a host of related documents such as internal documents making the case to employ someone new, job descriptions, interview checklists, reference check documents, offer letters and induction documents.

5  Checklists

Compliance in areas like marketing is one area that many organisations struggle with. 

While there are sometimes checklists which set out the requirements for different types of offers, if there are too many options the marketing team can't see the wood for the trees and overlook important details which are only picked up at the end of the process. This was a particular problem for a bank I worked with, where very different requirements applied for term deposits, managed funds, insurance etc.

With automation of the checklist, common offer types can be selected from a menu, so that only questions relevant to those offers will then show up - ensuring focus.  Making the questions mandatory will ensure they can't be overlooked.  When they come to legal for sign-off, they should have everything covered off.

You can go further and automate the required legal wording, so that depending on the relevant offer, the wording they need to include is automatically generated.

6   Company secretarial documents

With document automation, you can quickly and consistently prepare common resolutions, related certificates and authorisations that comply with the Companies Act (and any updates) without the risks of copying from last years documents. 

If you are a listed company, and need to make stock exchange announcements, automation can help to ensure that the announcement is accurate and fully compliant with relevant rules and underlying transaction documents.

If you or people you support work with these types of documents, and you would like to know how they could work in your organisation , please see this more detailed resource page for in-house lawyers, or get in touch for a chat and a demonstration of some examples of how it could work for you.  We are also happy to review your own documents and advise on how they could be custom automated to suit your specific requirements.