What HotDocs Is (and Isn’t)

You may already know that the answer to the question “What is HotDocs?” doesn’t have an easy answer. In some ways, we wish it did—it would probably make marketing, sales, and tech support a whole lot easier. But in other ways, we are glad our software is complex—because that’s what sets us apart from our competition and makes us the stand-alone leader in document automation technology.

Shortly after being hired to my current position, I mentioned to a friend that I’d be working at a company called HotDocs. He replied with a smirk, “Oh, so you’ll be working with a bunch of attractive medical professionals?” Um, not really. We are also not affiliated with fast food served on a bun, or the Canadian International Documentary Festival. Our sales department is commonly asked if we sell sets of pre-packaged legal forms. While there are several publishers out there who sell ready-to-use forms that are powered by HotDocs, that’s not the solution we offer (ours is better and much more versatile. . . We’ll talk about that in a minute). So, that must mean that HotDocs is a document management system, a workflow system, or a piece of case management software, right? Nope. None of the above.

Now, don’t give up yet. Take a deep breath, and find out what HotDocs really is.

Many professionals must create documents every day—including contracts, insurance forms, legal documents, and more—that require entering the same type of information over and over again. Creating these documents from scratch (or even editing existing forms) can be a time-consuming and frustrating process that is prone to human error.

Let’s say you’re an attorney who creates estate planning documents. What do you do when a client asks you to draft a will? Do you start by taking one that was created for a previous client and modifying it– replacing names and contact info, adding and removing sections of text, followed by lots of editing and proofreading? How long does this process take – an hour? Two? Maybe even longer?

Now, let’s see the difference with HotDocs. For example, you can turn an existing will that is in Microsoft Word, Corel WordPerfect, or PDF format into a template using HotDocs Developer. Then the next time you need the same type of document, just retrieve the template, answer some questions about the new file you need, and with a click of the mouse, an error-free document is ready to go.

As a bonus, when one template is changed, all linked templates are updated automatically. That means you can easily and efficiently maintain large libraries of templates, while guaranteeing that up-to-date information is available in every document.

So, what HotDocs really is . . . is the most powerful and flexible document generation tool available. It allows you to create templates for virtually any document in your workflow, saving time and manpower, and cutting the number of data errors down to a fraction of what they were before.

After your templates have been created with HotDocs Developer, they can be deployed via the desktop, a server, or—thanks to our latest development, HotDocs Document Services—the cloud.

Sounds great, doesn’t it?

Now that you know the basics, take a look around our website or give us a call to see what HotDocs can do for you.