Who should build your company’s HotDocs templates?

If your company is new to HotDocs, you might be wondering who exactly should be responsible for creating your templates. The IT specialist? An engineer? An intern? Your secretary or receptionist?

Ideally, the best person to build HotDocs templates is a content expert—someone who knows exactly what needs to be included in each document generated from your templates (language, formatting, conditional text, calculations, etc.) This ensures that your final documents will be as fail-proof as possible.

For example, let’s say you’re an estate planner, and your office generates wills on a daily basis. If one of your clients has children, you will need to include stipulations in the will regarding each child’s inheritance, and, if the children are minors, who will be their guardian if their parents are unable to care for them anymore. However, if the client has no children, most or all of this information can be left out of the final document. The content expert is the one who knows all the nitty-gritty details of what circumstances need to be accounted for and how each document will vary from the rest.

Like with any software program, it will take some practice to become an expert at developing templates, but you definitely don’t need to have a technical background to be successful. HotDocs does all the hard work for you behind the scenes—you don’t need to know how to write code or build a software program from scratch. But to get the best and most solid templates possible, you do need to know the content of the document you are automating inside and out.

To find out how to get started with template development, check out our training resources. We’re confident that once you understand the basics, you’ll be up and running in no time!