Legal Technology Journal

The forgotten productivity tool

Sometimes it seems that there’s a big new development in IT each and every week and we’re always being told that without it we are missing out. In many cases this is true, but at the same time there are some standard pieces of kit that we have already made a major investment in that we don’t use to their full potential. Take Microsoft Word. It is so omnipresent as to be near invisible. We’re so used to using it that we no longer question whether we’re using it in the best way.

This failure to think more deeply about Word is particularly unfortunate in the legal sector where, as I like to say, the document is the lawyer’s product. The core output that clients come to law firms for is a properly prepared legal document. So it seems bizarre that the tools that firms use to prepare their documents have developed tremendously since the advent of PC-based word processing, yet our understanding of Word has not grown in the same way. We still struggle to create and maintain well constructed documents – ie documents that are properly formatted and free of corruption. There must, you would think, be a more efficient and effective way of insuring the health of our primary product.

There are numerous problems with Word, particularly when it comes to the sort of lengthy and complex documents that the legal industry produces. Simple things like formatting and page numbering alone can be huge issues in a massive document. These problems have been exacerbated by the prevalence of e-mail and the volume of electronic file sharing. How do you keep a document properly formatted, styled and corruption-free when it is opened and modified by so many people?

Yet maintaining the quality of both the format and structure of a precedent document collection is critically important. Precedents are a collective baseline from which all future documents are created. As professional service lawyers work to maintain the content of these documents, the precedents often lose their formatting and structure, which leads to a poor-quality starting point for a new document.

The situation is made worse by the fact that most of us have not adopted coherent conversion strategies when we have upgraded from a previous version of Microsoft Word or even WordPerfect. This leads to serious legacy issues – WordPerfect codes in Word documents, redundant or conflicting numbering schemes and incompatible document set-up. It all adds up to document instability and unpredictable results.

The problems of appearance are not the only issues – inconsistent formatting and incorrect page numbering could potentially cause huge issues with comprehension, something that’s clearly important on a sensitive legal matter. On a more technical level, an improperly formatted Word document can sometimes prevent the creation of a good PDF document and, if you’re using a package like DeltaView to compare documents, then poor formatting can also make comparison problematic.

These issues are not just details either – as well as potentially leading to client dissatisfaction or, more importantly, an inaccurate document, these problems can consume huge amounts of time as people try to deal with them manually. Secretaries’ time isn’t cheap and neither is that of helpdesk staff, but when lawyers become involved in trying to sort out a document then the potential opportunity cost can become more than one would imagine is sensible for what should be a simple, routine task.

Thankfully for everyone involved in the production of legal documents, there is a range of solutions to hand. As well as things like automated document creation tools, there are now software packages that can help sort out some of the trickier corruption and formatting problems inherent in large Word documents.

One example is Knowledge Partnership from Microsystems. This includes a series of sub-modules that undertake a range of advanced analysis and repair functions on Word documents. For instance, running a document through DocXtools provides an analysis of what is wrong with it as well as the automatic resolution of issues and application of styles. Where problems cannot automatically be resolved, it highlights where there are issues. All told, DocXtools saves, on average, 75% of the time typically spent to manually clean up and reformat a document.1

What is also interesting about these tools from a legal CIO’s point of view is the potential cost benefit. Working as plug-ins to your existing software, packages like DocXtools drastically reduce the time spent cleaning up and reformatting documents – providing an increased level of efficiency that can run into the tens of thousands of hours annually for a medium-sized law firm.

The moral of this tale, if there is one, is that savings can begin closer to home than you might think. Whilst it’s always satisfying to undertake a grand rip-and-replace project that results in huge savings over time, sometimes it’s also worth looking at the details of how your staff work in order to identify new areas where money can be saved. 

Clare Waller is a legal Word expert at Tikit.

1. A white paper detailing the potential ROI of using the tools is available on request. Please e-mail Clare Waller: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it