Who is it for: Experienced users of legaltech. Documate was one of the first document automation platforms to emerge from the latest wave of legal technology (you may have seen ads at virtually every online law conference). It actually serves as the backbone of one of the hottest legaltech startups: HelloDivorce. Documate has a short learning curve and is slowly adding a few feeding features. Melehy and his team of engineers and lawyers say they believe creating accurate legal documents shouldn`t be something that consumes the resources of small law firms. They created Woodpecker to enable lawyers, paralegals and legal administrators to automate the generation of commonly used legal documents from Microsoft Word. That`s why we`ve set out to simplify the process of assembling Word documents by creating a Word add-in that automates the creation of legal documents in your existing processes and workflows. You don`t even need to spend time learning new software. What sets Rally apart from the crowd is that it focuses on the overall customer experience.
It has a full-fledged customer portal. It has a menu of services that you can put on your website to sell your legal services online so clients can start working without calling or emailing. There are admission forms and questionnaires. It essentially allows you to turn your law firm into your own online document automation. Each customer-oriented feature is carefully designed and intuitive to use. Are you an experienced user with a lot of experience in legaltech? You probably want to check out AfterPattern or Knackly. Respect the OG. Before Documate and Afterpattern, and before this recent wave of “no-code” document automation platforms that promise to turn any lawyer into an entrepreneur into legal technology software, there was a brilliant and solid open source platform developed by a legal aid lawyer, Jonathan Pyle. One thing is clear: most small law firms and individual law firms are still struggling with Word to create legal documents.
Say goodbye to manual, time-consuming and error-prone processes for preparing legal documents. Say hello to Woodpecker Legal Document Automation. Woodpecker helps you automate legal documents in Microsoft Word to reduce risk, increase profits and attract more clients. No additional staff are required. In recent years, the number of cloud-based platforms that allow you to automatically generate legal documents has exploded as lawyers increasingly seek to streamline their firm`s operations. The beauty of these platforms is that they require light coding or no coding at all – any lawyer who has a few hours to spare can create an “app” that saves countless hours of manual document writing over that lawyer`s career. Woodpecker lets you quickly and accurately fill out Word legal documents, from fee agreements and discovery requests to trusts and wills The first impression I got that stuck in my mind when reviewing this tool was that this Doc automation platform has one of the smoothest user interfaces I`ve seen in a Legaltech product. It`s pretty. It`s smooth. It is easy to use. As with all these tools, the setup is as follows: Create templates in Word.
Answer a series of questions to provide the software with the data it needs to generate documents based on these templates. For whom: Open source enthusiasts, legal aid, programmers. Faster service to your customers by creating documents with existing customer information, conditional logic, and formula calculations. Automate the generation of multiple legal documents simultaneously and in one place. Are you a sole proprietorship or small business looking for a complete automation engine with a robust customer portal? Watch the rally. It helps you increase profitability with automated workflows and customer engagement capabilities that go beyond simple document generation. With Rally`s customer portal, customers can easily create, share and organize their documents. It also helps build customer buy-in and makes your business their hub for their legal information. Customers can also use the portal to book a meeting or purchase new services.
When you sign up for Woodpecker, you get a free trial of Woodpecker Pro. After that, subscribe to Woodpecker Starter, Pro, or Teams to continue accessing it. For more information, visit our pricing page: www.woodpeckerweb.com/pricing In this episode of How It Works: Woodpecker, AI-powered legal document automation for sole proprietorships and small businesses. In the video below, founder and CEO Alex Melehy introduces Woodpecker and demonstrates how it works. Woodpecker is designed to be intuitive, allowing anyone to create powerful customer onboarding templates and questionnaires without the need for expensive consultants or IT resources. Woodpecker connects to more than 3,000 other apps through Zapier, making it possible to generate documents without opening Word. Knackly is a new competitor in the field of document automation. You don`t see them at trade shows, but they`re starting to show up in search results and social feeds, so we took a look. For whom: Companies that want to deliver a world-class customer experience Like most of these other platforms, you can create your own templates. But this ignores one of Smokeball`s greatest strengths: its library of shapes.
For most lawyers, it`s great to be able to create a template in Microsoft Word or one of these document automation platforms, but who has the time? Sure, you can get around this by paying the software company a little more to create the template for you, but how great is it when the forms you need are already there? According to their website, they have 17,000 public forms (such as those published by courts or bar associations), as well as a library of practice-specific forms. Complete one or more Word documents, depending on the conditions you define. Who is it for: people who want a short learning curve. Avoid embarrassing mistakes and reduce the risk of creating inaccurate documents. Afterpattern also has a Word add-in, so you don`t need to type anything that looks like code into a document. You have portals in case you want to resell your documents to lawyers or provide clients with their own self-service space. For whom: Clio users who are familiar with a complex model creation system. Do you want an easy way to generate documents and don`t feel like sending a questionnaire to your customers? Lawyaw. In this video, Melehy gives an overview of Woodpecker and then demonstrates six key features: Why isn`t the free and open source tool the defending champion? This requires coding. You need to know simplified Python expressions (YAMLs) and be able to configure things like a “Docker instance” and other nerd sorcery to host your own DocAssemble server. While other platforms are turnkey and mostly code-free, this one is really a foundation for building your own platform if you`re feeling adventurous and want to learn code. Few lawyers think this way, keeping this stylish tool on the field as new competitors join the space race.
With such an influx of options, how do you know which ones to choose? We`ll review some of the popular no-code options like Lawyaw, Documate, and Afterpattern, as well as cutting-edge lightweight code tools like Rally and Knackly, and finally practice management tools that also offer document automation, such as Clio and Smokeball.