HotDocs

Capsofts "Hot" Way to Make Documents

This month's review focuses on a product of interest to lawyers and others whose living depends on their written work product: Capsoft Development Corporation's 1997 entry into the document assembly wars, HotDocs Pro 4.1.

HotDocs aims to cut your time, effort, and error risks in generating repetitive documents. At least one solo attorney says that automated document assembly makes him productive enough to compete with larger law firms. Capsoft claims that HotDocs is the best-selling document assembly program in history, with more users than all others combined.

HotDocs for Windows works inside word processors, including Corel WordPerfect, Microsoft Word, and Lotus Ami Pro (not Word Pro yet). While HotDocs uses these word processors' macro languages to do its work, it shields you from having to define databases and write macro programs.

Automated Interviews

Instead, HotDocs appears before you in the guise of an interviewer. It does its "interviews" through Windows-style dialog boxes. These dialogs ask questions like the parties' names and genders, and the finished document reflects your answers.

Using pre-written HotDocs templates is a snap. A few mouse clicks will get you generating finished documents from a template, with easy-to-understand dialog boxes single-stepping you through the "interview."

Your office can make this virtual interview an actual oral interview. Your secretary or paralegal can read questions to your client right from the HotDocs screen, and enter the answers as the client gives them.

HotDocs can generate two sorts of documents. One is the rigidly formatted "form," the paper with lines and answer boxes in precise locations on the page, such as a college application or a California Judicial Council pleading form. The other is a free-flowing document, like an agreement, a will, or a federal court pleading. Either sort of finished document begins as a HotDocs "template."

Templates and Form Templates

Capsoft calls the rigidly formatted line-and-box templates (like Judicial Council forms) "form templates." The others are just "templates."

If you look behind the user interface, a HotDocs template consists of a pair of disk files. One, called the "template file," is a word processing document containing the finished document's fixed text and formatting, plus spaces where variable information can go. The other, called a "component file," contains further specifics on the variables, interview questions, and other supporting information.

Capsoft supplies a number of template sets. Its "General Practitioner's Resource" CD-ROM contains selected real estate, personal injury, estate planning, bankruptcy, family law, and employment law templates, written by specialists for the legal market. The program looks to your CD-ROM drive for its templates, so you have to have the CD handy.

The need to insert a CD for each task reminds me of the 1980s, when you often had to insert a diskette to run a program. The need to search for the right CD may cut into your productivity gains from automating document generation.

With some technical tweaking, you may be able to store these CD-ROM based template libraries on your hard disk. Given today's increasingly capacious and economical hard drives, this could be worth your while to explore.

Another template set, "Federal Court Forms for HotDocs," contains a number of items with fill-in boxes, such as criminal and civil subpoenas, a Civil Cover Sheet that you use to commence a civil case, and a Bill of Costs. The federal package includes only line-and-box forms, not free-flowing documents. Because federal litigation tends to rely heavily on free-form pleadings, this library would have limited usefulness in my practice.

Capsoft is proud of HotDocs' ability to tailor the documents it generates by programming logic. It shows its pride by the phrase "smart templates."

A template shows its smarts by conforming personal pronouns, for example, to the gender and other characteristics of the person to whom the pronoun refers. A HotDocs "smart" template can go so far as to include or exclude whole sections of the document based on the answers to interview questions. A "smart" template can save hours of attorney or support staff time spent examining a document to make sure its language is conformed.

Building Smart Templates

Capsoft and its allied vertical market application developers can, however, cover only a portion of the legal profession's document generation needs with pre-written templates. Consequently, you may ask whether we, as users, can generate "smart" HotDocs templates for our own practices.

The answer is that you can write your own templates, such as the free-flowing pleadings you might use in federal practice, with the $99 HotDocs program. If you need to go beyond Judicial Council and other available line-and-box forms to make your own "form templates," as distinguished from free-flowing document templates, you need the more costly HotDocs Pro.

Learning Curve

But building a template is not nearly as easy as going through a pre-written template's interview to generate a document. Template making demands some training.

Rolling your own templates means, first, that you have to learn some HotDocs menu sequences and jargon. Before I could make a template, from scratch or from a finished document, I needed to go through the lessons in a manual entitled "Learning HotDocs." Making a template was much easier because of these helpful, well-written lessons.

A Development Test

To test HotDocs' template development process, I tried making a template from a set of three pleadings I use for tort case settlements. Making my example into a template was relatively straightforward, if a bit time-consuming, after I took the "Learning HotDocs" tutorial.

Development support has improved since HotDocs 3. Then, you had to type in "him" and "her" as the male and female pronouns to use in a particular space. Now, the program supplies a list of pairs (he/she, him/her), and you choose the correct pair with a mouse click.

This is not to say that development is totally automated. Unlike the pre-written templates, HotDocs' template development tools have some gaps in their "smartness."

For example, when you create a variable (a space for a name, a dollar amount, a date or some other piece of information relevant to the end document), you have to specify the variable type. A dialog box lists seven types: text, date, number, true/false, multiple choice, computation, and personal information. The suggested type always is "text."

You typically get to this dialog box by replacing some item in your example document with a space for variable information. Thus, you might have highlighted "July 1, 1997" to create in its place a variable called "Agreement Date." Making the template would go faster if the program sensed the date nature of the highlighted material and gave you "date" as the suggested type for this variable. Perhaps the next version will do this.

System Requirements

HotDocs Pro 4.1 is available in a 16-bit version, which works with Windows 3.1 and IBM OS/2 Warp's Windows emulator, and a 32-bit version, for Windows 95. There also is a DOS version. I ran the 16-bit version under Windows 3.1 and WIN-OS/2, and the 32-bit under Win95, on machines ranging from an 8 meg 486-66 to a 32 meg Cyrix Pentium-166 clone. Even counting a few draggy operations on the 486-66, HotDocs did not seem to overburden this equipment.

How Much?

HotDocs 4.1 costs $99. It lets you generate finished documents from "templates" and "form templates," and make templates except "form" templates. Add-on template libraries range from about $30 to about $99. (The Judicial Council Form set is at the upper end.) For any who need to write "form" templates, HotDocs Pro 4.1 costs $399.

Corel has announced a Legal Edition of its popular software suite (the one with WordPerfect, Quattro Pro, Paradox and others). The Suite 7 Legal Edition adds HotDocs, Full Authority, CompareRite, Amicus Attorney, and a number of other substantial software packages of interest to attorneys, at an attractive price ($249 upgrade retail, $200 street). Corel will be the featured presenter in one of this fall's SLUG meetings, so watch this space for more on this suite.

Reference

HotDocs 4.1 and HotDocs Pro 4.1, available in DOS and 16- and 32-bit Windows versions, starting at $99, Capsoft Development Corporation, 2222 South 950 East, Provo, UT 84606, (800) 500-DOCS, http://www.capsoft.com