HotDocs Document Automation Blog: Document Services
Practical Benefits of Document Assembly
For many years I practiced law, much of the time as a partner responsible for managing technology. That's where I first encountered HotDocs. Now I help folks (including lots of lawyers) implement document automation. But part of me still sees the world through the eyes of a practicing lawyer. Maybe that's why, when I hear...
Working Together in the Cloud
HotDocs has been available to create extraordinary document automation systems in an online mode for nearly fifteen years, first via HotDocs Server, and more recently via HotDocs Document Services and HotDocs Cloud Services. It supports innovative service delivery methods that combine the power of machine intelligence and network distribution. For legal service providers, cloud-based assembly...
Enforcing Compliance with Document Automation and Low-Code BPM
Imagine this. You’re one of the world’s largest banks having thousands of branch offices scattered around the globe, and you’ve got a huge problem. Individual loan officers (thousands of them) are making ad hoc edits to loan agreements totaling billions of dollars. In some cases, the edits are designed to make customers happy. In other...
CIO Review Gets It Right—HotDocs for Compliance Just Makes Sense
Compliance is becoming an increasingly important topic for today’s enterprises given an ever growing body of legislation designed to dictate and regulate corporate behavior. Consider Dodd-Frank, PCI-DSS, GLBA, and Sarbanes-Oxley, to name just a few such regulatory acts. Implicit in the compliance discussion is the question of how? Given a rat’s nest of rules and...
Modularization of Point Solutions: Time for a Low Code Platform
According to some researchers, the early stages of a market are dominated by integrated solutions—products built top to bottom by the same vendor. The reasons for this phenomenon are often reliability and performance. In other words, products composed of components from multiple manufacturers, in the early stages of a market, will be less reliable and...
Document Assembly: Why “simple” may not be good enough
Long ago, I ran the publications department for Capsoft, the predecessor to HotDocs Corporation.My small team and I were tasked with documenting the ultra-sophisticated CAPS platform, a process that included producing professional quality manuals. To get the job done, a software investment would need to be made. What it boiled down to was a choice...
HotDocs: Compliance Software for Low Code Environments
For a casual onlooker, categorizing HotDocs might be difficult. Compare, for example, ILTA’s 2013 Technology Survey, which showed HotDocs as the leader in the document assembly class, with a 2013 Gartner market trends analysis that referred to HotDocs as a “best of breed” vendor within the ECM space. In 2014, Gartner reinforced its classification of...
The Low Code Trend: BPMs, ECMs, and HotDocs Cloud Services
In Q4 of 2013, Gartner published a market trends report that pointed to two important catalysts to growth in the ECM space: interoperability among disparate content management applications and the emergence of standards for content management vendors. In that same research, Gartner analysts Tom Eid and Bianco Francesca Granetto pointed to HotDocs as a “best...
From multinationals to small law: EMC’s Paul Dacier highlights the need for speed at Harvard Law’s Disruptive Innovation Conference
At the recent conference staged at Harvard Law School on disruptive innovation, Paul Dacier, EMC’s GC lead who moonlights as President of the Boston Bar Association, focused much of his presentation on the importance of speed. Dacier, pointing to intellectual property as the company’s “lifeblood,” explained just some of the measures his group takes to...
Samantha V. Watson: IBM’s Michael D. Rhodin talks cognition at Harvard Law’s disruptive innovation conference
In a recent transatlantic flight, I happened to queue up the movie “Her,” a futuristic film about a character named Theodore who falls in love with his operating system (something like a much more sophisticated version of Apple’s Siri). What makes the movie really interesting, though, is that the operating system, which names itself Samantha,...
What do red curry and large law have in common? Firoz Dattu of AdvanceLaw sheds some light on “Yelp-ification”
In a recent conference at Harvard Law School, Firoz Dattu, CEO of AdvanceLaw, pointed to the “Yelp-ification of the legal industry” as a specific disruptor of large law practices. Yelp, a popular mobile app, allows users to quickly find the best drink, dry cleaning, etc., complete with cell-phone pics and star ratings from actual customers....
Glenn Rawdon of LSC Talks Document Assembly at the White House
HotDocs, a Gartner best-of-breed vendor for document assembly in 2013 and a Cool Vendor for Content Management in 2014, is the platform on which LSC-funded entities automate the production of legal documents. In a recent speech delivered at the White House, Glenn Rawdon, Technology Program Counsel at LSC, a government agency established to promote and...