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July 30, 2006
Document Drafting Tools
I'm a big fan of feeding the right information to users at the right time without them even asking for it. Of course, that's not an easy thing to do, but there are products out there trying to perfect the process, such as West KM and Lexis TotalSearch. When these products are installed, they provide a firm's internal documents to a user doing a Lexis and/or Westlaw search, helping those who might not realize that there's useful, internal information available.
That might be fine for litigators who frequently search case law on Lexis and/or Westlaw during the course of their research, but what about transactional attorneys who spend most of their time in Word, drafting documents? According to Lisa Kellar, in Document Drafting Tools, (Practice Innovations, July 2006), "new tools are beginning to emerge that help attorneys draft documents in context, allowing them to perform all the steps involved without ever leaving Word: from searching for examples of past work product, to performing legal research, to easily applying styles, and to proofreading documents."
Suffice it to say, this can be cool stuff, for example, allowing automatic links to subject materials from within Word documents, and offering examples of clauses that can be dragged and dropped into the appropriate section of a contract. If the user won't go to the mountain....
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