How Are We So Fast?

Solo practitioners and family law departments at “big firms” alike marvel and shake their heads at the speed and accuracy of our documents

We are trial lawyers. Trial lawyers are not generally known for great writing skills. Yet we have heads turning because of the combined speed and accuracy of our document output. While everyone else leaves mediation with a half-page of scrawled notes or a page or two of typed notes if the mediator was willing to take the time, our clients leave successful mediation sessions with completely signed packets of court orders.

How?

The reality about document drafting by most lawyers is this:

• It is either written from scratch each time, which is terribly inefficient and expensive for clients and has an increased likelihood that an important standard provision will be accidentally omitted, or

• A form is re-used, often from other cases, and drafts include embarrassing information from other cases and clients or grammatical and typographical errors that may impact future interpretation and enforceability

We invested in software for the benefit of our clients. Initially, the purpose of deep investment into document-generation was for quality control purposes. We wanted to eliminate the most common issues with drafting and increase accuracy. So we added Docrio, which is the world’s best, most powerful document management tool.

Our investment had a compound effect. What we found was that not only were our documents more accurate, we could create entire packets of documents in mere seconds. Our intake process gathers the granular details that we need for the entire case, making our templates universally accurate from start to finish.

Now our clients have a competitive advantage in every case. Recently, in a deposition, the other side disclosed a new witness. Right there, in the deposition, we generated a complete suite of subpoenas and letters in mere seconds.

Our document-creation speed gives us an advantage as trial lawyers. We are no longer bogged down with mountains of orders and forms to write. We push out accurate paperwork in a fraction of the time as our counterparts, and we use that additional time to prepare our cases for trial.

The reason we have maintained that advantage is this: other lawyers are content with the old method. They believe that inefficiency leads to more billing for them. So they remain buried in paperwork and don’t return phone calls for days and even weeks while we are prosecuting our cases to mediation and trial.