Two Law Firm Applications for HotDocs Cloud Services
HotDocs Cloud Services, the industry leading document generation platform, has a clear and distinct value proposition: better documents in less time and for less money than any other method and delivered on demand in any organization’s custom environments—web pages or applications. For law firms, Cloud Services may be applied any number of different ways, but there are two that seem to be emerging as especially valuable, both of them having to do with embedding HotDocs interviews in a firm’s own web pages.
Prospecting for New Clients
One large firm that specializes in intellectual property law uses HotDocs to prospect for new clients. The firm embeds HotDocs interviews in its home page, and the answers to the questions in the interviews are used to generate valuable documents necessary for forming a new corporation around some piece of intellectual property. As one partner in the firm puts it, “we’re looking for the next big thing—the next Google or Facebook.” By offering this service for free on its home page, the firm has an opportunity to review the business plans of many new companies with the hope of forming long-term relationships with the really interesting ones.
Servicing Existing clients
Another law firm embeds HotDocs interviews in its web pages specifically to assist its existing customers in accessing the firm’s services. By first giving a client logon credentials, the firm can expose the client to the interviews for certain types of documents. The client can enter her own information into the interview, saving the firm time and resources and actually improving the accuracy of the data entry. A lawyer at the firm can generate and review the documents before meeting with the client.
In the new normal of legal services (alternative fee arrangements and general commoditization that pervades the industry) HotDocs Cloud Services offers firms genuine value and a state-of-the-art approach to finding and servicing clients. And the best part is, it’s cloud based—nothing to buy. And given HotDocs zero-state design, your client’s sensitive data is never stored on a HotDocs server.
Wondering what a HotDocs interview is?
A HotDocs interview is the part of a HotDocs app that users actually see and interact with. An interview consists of a wizard-like sequence of interactive forms designed to gather information. Unlike run-of-the mill form tools, like you might find in any BPMs or dedicated form design tool, HotDocs allows you to design highly interactive forms. Questions in a particular form can be conditional, meaning they will appear or disappear based on the answers to earlier questions. Likewise, entire forms full of questions can also be added to or removed from an interview based on conditional logic. HotDocs forms handle repeating information with ease, and you can build in validation rules and help resources to assist users with answering the questions accurately.