Challenge
LawHawk was launched in June 2016 after the managing director of the company, Gene Turner, decided to make HotDocs document automation available as a service to his fellow lawyers in New Zealand.
Gene discovered HotDocs when practicing law at an international firm between 2001 and 2003 and then again in 2012 while at a different firm. When trialling HotDocs at his own firm, Gene was using a complicated system where he would try and write instructions for a developer who in turn would create templates. However, this didn’t work, the process often had to be repeated and still the desired outcome was not reached so Gene decided that he would learn how to do it for himself. He was delighted to find that HotDocs wasn’t hard to use at all and he could easily build and test templates in real time without needing to write instructions and wait for delivery.
Solution
Due to Gene’s history with HotDocs and after looking at other document automation systems, he was confident that HotDocs could do all the complex automation that he wanted to do and that it provided a suitable platform where he could offer the templates to his clients. He and his team began working with HotDocs Developer and HotDocs Cloud Services to create the online legal document generation service that is LawHawk today. The fully managed service allows lawyers to create legal and procurement documents quickly and without the need for their own document automation solution.
LawHawk’s progress was helped on by Midware, who are a partner of HotDocs based in New Zealand, and also by the online help resources such as the HotDocs Forum and HotDocs Academy.
In the first year of business, LawHawk has concentrated on raising awareness of the solution and has been building and maintaining a library of up to date templates to offer to lawyers in New Zealand. The company has also completed custom automation for clients, which has included combining templates into a single document with different outputs depending on how questions are answered. This also applies to their public facing documents too.
In addition, LawHawk have a formal integration with the matter management system provider, Lawvu (www.lawwu.com), where they have integrated the ability to launch LawHawk/HotDocs interviews from within the Lawvu system.
Results
For both the public facing part of the LawHawk website service and the private automation work they do, the organization uses HotDocs automation to help clients easily produce more complex documents, using less resources, than they can without automation.
LawHawk offers a managed service with HotDocs rather than just a technology service. Due to their experience as lawyers, they can use their experience to help customers understand how a process could be automated to create highly customized sets of documents. Also, LawHawk can help clients to think about how they can grow their practice by not only doing the same amount of work, faster, but by focussing on a core area of their practice and having a clearly aligned strategy, to win new work though genuinely working differently and better than their competitors.
For Gene, HotDocs opened up the opportunity for him to establish a new business that has a positive impact on the legal profession.
He says:
“With so many other “disruptive” alternative providers emerging, lawyers will need to be able to offer something more than what clients can do themselves over the internet. HotDocs powerful automation, combined with its cloud platform, should enable even the smallest of law firms to access the type of technology that previously only the largest firms could afford. It wouldn’t have been possible for us to build a business like LawHawk without the ability to leverage a world-class platform like HotDocs.
The speed and ease with which we can use HotDocs to do complex document automation is the key. We know we can use HotDocs to give customers a high quality service, very quickly, and at a price they can be happy with.”
Looking to the future, LawHawk are deeply invested in the HotDocs platform and are regularly speaking with the HotDocs team about the HotDocs product roadmap and further opportunities to improve LawHawk’s offerings.”