Organizing Your Legal Documents, One Template at a Time

A template management system is one of those organizational tools that is so important to firms that produce a lot of documents, yet isn’t always implemented.

Every law firm understands the value of templates, but they can become outdated or misplaced without proper organization. This diminishes their time-saving and consistency values.

Template management systems help law firms centralize their documents, maintain version control and can also provide automation features. This results in significant time savings for your staff and lawyers.

Without a template management system, one either has to continuously search the firm’s network for the correct templates, which can take too long and is not a very consistent method. Or one has to reuse old documents, leaving significant room for error.

To avoid these scenarios, the best process is to implement a template management system.

What a Template Management System is

Template management systems store templates in one place for various kinds of document types as a way to ensure consistency and maintain version control.

The templates can be sorted into groups based on practice area (i.e. estates, litigation, etc.) and/or the type of document (i.e. letters, agreements, forms, etc.), as well as office location. If you are constantly creating new letters and agreements, which every law firm does, a template management system is the perfect solution.

A template management system allows for maximum reliability for document creation, because you’ll know that the template you’re choosing is the most up-to-date and accurate.

Since it’s one system that’s available to everyone in the firm (even across different offices), there’s no more scouring the network for templates. You just go to the correct folder, select your template, and start working.

Template management systems allow law firms to centrally manage and update their entire template collection. For example, when a firm goes through a re-branding, and letterheads and formatting standards change, these systems enable a firm to make global updates to all their templates. This ensures accuracy and consistency across all the firm’s documents and gets every user on the same page.

So, simply put, a template management system keeps templates organized for everyone in your firm.

Why Law Firms Need Template Management

It is critically important for legal professionals to be accurate when creating documents. If names and dates are wrong, a clause is missing, or the firm’s old address is still in the footer, the results could be severe.

With a template management system, the chances of making mistakes go down significantly. The software promotes best practices, encouraging users to build documents from clean templates. This is faster and more efficient than reusing old documents and results in more accurate documents.

The layout is there for you -- you just need to fill in the variables.

Also, some template management systems have intelligent automation built into them. This could mean that the system connects to your Outlook, so it’s easy to select a contact whose most up-to-date information is automatically entered where it needs to be. This is another example of better efficiency and accuracy.

A template management system with intelligent automation eliminates many tedious tasks. A legal professional can simply:

1. Pick a template from the correct folder.

2. Plug in all the names through the contact management tool.

3. Toggle the letterhead on and off without concern for formatting glitches.

4. Move on to the next task.

Conclusion

Why spend so much of your time trying to manage templates and format documents manually when there are better law firm productivity solutions out there to do those tasks for you?

Staying organized through template management and automation improves accuracy and consistency.

Infoware's template management and document automation software helps law firms to:

• Manage templates

• Assemble legal documents

• Automate formatting tasks

For more information, please visit our website.