Legal Technology Journal

Templates in Microsoft Word are one of the most important productivity tools that exist in a law firm. This may seem like a contentious statement but, when you think about the centrality of Word in almost every stage of the legal process, then having the appropriate tools underlying every document that you produce is clearly vitally important to effective working.

Templates are the underlying structures that give headings, style and numbering to Word documents – at the very basic level the layout of faxes, agreements and letters. However, templates also do much more than most people think. While they manage the look and feel of a document, they also manage its interaction with other systems, for example integrating a fax format with the CRM system to enable you to pull up contact details or to record the communication. They can also be used to define things like custom toolbars so that when, for example, you choose the agreement template, it will bring up a toolbar giving you the relevant buttons for things like numbering and heading styles.

Templates are used by all types of businesses in every market but it’s only really in legal that they get worked to the edge of their functionality. The legal market relies extremely heavily on massively long, heavily structured and numbered documents that are repeatedly edited by multiple different authors, meaning that poorly constructed and cumbersome templates can make the difference between a good document and a bad one. Without effective, reliable and efficient templates, the scale of the customisations and code can rapidly either bring about an unreadable mess or cause machines to crash at the very thought of running them!

When you combine the complexity of legal Word templates with the general state of their construction, you can see why many firms are now facing serious issues with their template portfolios. Ever since the first versions of Word, lawyers and their IT teams have been creating and improving the functionality of the templates that they use. Over 15 years of word-processing history means huge stacks of code have built up behind each template with no real structure or logic and functionality simply being added in as and when needed. While this made sense at the time, as new versions of Word emerge and the functionality of templates has got even richer, the weight of bad code has become untenable. Many firms are now using the collective results of 15 years of unplanned development, causing horribly slow document processing and massive unreliability.

What is needed is a fundamental rethink of the way that templates are constructed and used. Rather than each individual template being built on the fly, a considered and structured approach to their construction needs to be adopted. At the most basic level, a fundamental restructuring of template code needs to be undertaken – rather than having individual templates containing separate code, each should call up to a central common functionality code base to take the relevant elements. Not only does this make each template smaller and leaner, it also means that when a change in functionality is needed on a firmwide basis, you only need to change the central code base and not each individual template.

Tikit has recognised the importance of Microsoft Word as a legal productivity tool and its Word Excellence Centre has been created to make the most out of its functionality. As part of this, the Tikit Office Framework has been developed to give firms a clear route toward rebuilding the template portfolio. Over 12 months of development has gone into creating an audit procedure for existing templates, as well as a new framework based on C# and .Net to create a structured and effective approach to templates. Using this new approach, firms not only get access to effective, stable and functionally rich templates, but they also get a simple and powerful tool for creating new templates and editing existing ones on a firmwide basis.

Microsoft Word is a mission-critical application for the legal industry, a fact that is all too often overlooked. Templates are at the very core of the functionality that makes Word so important and therefore their effective management is a must for every forward-looking legal IT manager.

For more information about the Tikit Word Excellence Centre and the Tikit Office Framework, please contact Tikit marketing on +44 20 7400 3737, e-mail This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it or visit www.tikit.com. 

Liam Flanagan is a director and Tikit founder.