The Case for HotDocs: “The Proof is in the Pudding”

I have no idea where the phrase, “the proof is in the pudding” came from… maybe England, where they tend to overwork the word pudding, applying it to everything from congealed animal blood to dinner rolls. Regardless of where the phrase originated, we all know what it means—the quality of something is uncertain until it has been user tested. Such was the case with HotDocs document generation technology back in the day. When it first hit the market, no one was really sure how disruptive it would be.

I started thinking about this after returning from LegalTech, New York 2013, where I had the opportunity to deliver a couple dozen HotDocs presentations to one packed house after another during the three-day event. I’d start with a couple of intro slides, give a quick technology demo, and then breeze through three use cases, each an incredible story of ROI and risk/loss mitigation resulting from a broad application of HotDocs document generation software.

It was the user stories (the pudding, in this case) that really blew people away, drawing comments of “incredible,” “amazing,” “wow”—presentation after presentation! A global bank that had reduced its commercial loan generation process from three days to an hour; a sprawling government agency that had reduced the process of generating road-building contracts from three months to half a day; a national corporate services company that imposed strict governance on its contracting process, and in doing so, virtually eliminated legal exposure—each a true story, and each the proof in the pudding of HotDocs’s core value proposition: much better documents in much less time and with much less expense.