For those of you not yet familiar with the concept of document automation, called “document assembly”, here are the basics. It’s kind of like mail merge. It’s for forms like contracts or other documents where you change the names and addresses of the parties and other pieces of information that are unique to the transaction but where most of the document is boilerplate. If one were to print up the document and to fill it in by hand, there would be lots of boilerplate with blanks to be filled in with the details specific to the matter at hand.
Document assembly programs allow the user to create a fillable form with the idea of replacing the manual filling-in of words or phrases with answers from software-driven interview questions. At the click of a “fill” command, the answers then populate the document.
Until recently, document automation programs have been relatively expensive. One of the leaders and longstanding players in the industry has been HotDocs. In 1998, I won a copy of HotDocs at an annual computer software and hardware trade show in New York City called PC Expo. I don’t remember the full retail price of HotDocs, but it was several hundred dollars and worked hand-in-hand with Word and WordPerfect. I loved it. In 2000, I upgraded to WordPerfect 9.0 and didn’t realize that the version of HotDocs installed on my PC wasn’t compatible. I chose to stay with WordPerfect 9 and to limp along without HotDocs (which would have set me back several hundred dollars for an upgrade copy).
Today, HotDocs costs $800 just for the Developer’s tool, plus another couple of hundred dollars for each additional end user. From an economic standpoint, paying that kind of money for a document assembly program could easily pay off in a busy, form driven environment. For the solo practitioner or small law office on the other hand, document automation comes with too hefty a price tag for the occasional form agreement, will, or in the case of administrative law judges and hearing officers, routine reports.
For years I’ve been looking for a less expensive alternative that would save me time generating legal agreements like real estate contracts, wills, and other forms of agreement, and also for writing routine reports as a p/t ALJ for the agencies I work for.
Two weeks ago my search ended when I found TheFormTool PRO (www.theformtool.com) from a company called, Your Dollar Matters, Inc.
While I didn’t perform a side-by-side comparison with its more expensive cousins, I don’t think it’s necessary. TheFormTool PRO was able to do everything I required and then some. Based in Olympia, Washington, the company has produced a remarkable program that gets 100% integrated into MS Word and costs just $89.
The company also offers a free version called “TheFormTool,” which lacks some of the PRO version’s more advanced features but is great for taking it for a test drive. A third version, TheFormTool PRO PLUS, comes bundled with the company setting up five forms for $350.
With TheFormTool PRO you don’t need to know anything about programming to use it and from the time you download and install it, you’ll be creating basic forms in minutes, all from within Word. You create a form template and, as with any of Word’s functions, TheFormTool PRO’s tools appear in Word’s toolbar ribbon. [Click on the above graphic to enlarge.]
To create a form you click on TheFormTool’s “Table” button and it creates a Q&A table [see below] at the end of the document you want to use as a form. The generated Q&A table has three columns: A “Label”, a “Question”, and an “Answer”. For each column, you fill in the blanks, creating a Label and a Question for each row in the table. (As an example, the first Label could be “Respondent” and the question, “What is Respondent’s name?”) Then, when you’re done creating the table, you highlight the spots in the document (now a form!) that corresponds with the Label and define it. So, if the question has to do with giving
Respondent a name, you go to the case caption, highlight “Respondent” click on the “Field” button and designate it with the Respondent label. TheFormTool then knows that you want to replace the word Respondent in the case caption with your answer to the question in the Q&A table. It’s that simple! For corresponding verb agreement, pronouns, and plurals TheFormTool’s got that covered, too, by allowing you to easily incorporate those items into your form without the need to create extra Labels in the Q&A table or much additional work.
TheFormTool also has something they call Smart Answers [see graphic on left] that allows for incorporation of lists of items or people into a document so that they only have to be typed once, but can be inserted in multiple places into the form, even in different formats, like signature blocks or tables! Smart Answers also allows for “Nested Lists” or lists within lists. The obvious use for something like this is in constructing a will. But for hearing reports, a less obvious use could be listing types of violations within violations. As an example, “Article 14 of the New York State Public Health Law, Sections xxx, xxx, and xxx” where the the Article numbers are in one list, and when that list is selected, the sections are then automatically inserted into the report.
The other extremely powerful and sophisticated component is the Condition button. By designating a section of the form as a condition, the document becomes dynamic because you can add or delete words, phrases, or entire sections based on an answer to a question in the Q&A table.
Of real interest to the SED certified IHOs is the date feature, which allows for automatic calculation of dates for the timeline under the IDEA or the Commissioner’s Regs.
The company just released an upgrade the other day. It was already a great product when I first installed it, but now it’s faster. The upgrade included the new nested list function that I mentioned earlier, and is an answer to my specific needs. It’s true, the learning curve is just minutes, not days. I was automating some complex documents my very first day using TheFormTool PRO.
| Pros Cost: $89 Fully Integrates with MS Word 2007 and later The ability to save answers to use across different forms Cons |
No consideration of any kind has been accepted for this review. The opinions expressed herein are solely the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of NYSALJA.