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good afternoon everybody and thank you so much for joining us today our presentation this afternoon is going to dive into how to save time using document automation in a family law firm and so as we get into today's topic I can share a little bit of my background as a former practice management advisor for the Chicago Bar Association but then also as a technology trainer and helping build products and services for law firms document automation and assembly has been something that I've been personally passionate about since the the early 2000s I think that but the use of document automation and assembly tools is one of the few technologies where law firms and their staff can see the greatest impact right out of the gate and so teaching today is or joining me as Tucker Cunningham the co-founder of lawyer which is a cutting-edge provider of document automation tools for law firms and they're based in California and and just getting to know Tucker and his team you know as soon as I saw Lyle come into the marketplace you know I've seen all kinds of technology out there and this was by far you know one of the coolest most exciting things I have seen in a long time because you know Tucker you and your team have been able to break through a lot of the technical barriers that will explain in today's session and really document automation accessible and affordable for the the soloing of small law firms that need it most so thank you for joining us yeah thank you for having me yeah and you'd be yourself are also an attorney and practiced in San Francisco so you've used and seen these tools firsthand can you tell us a little bit of about your background and what brought you to co-found law and build the technology that we're going to be seeing today yeah absolutely so as you mentioned I'm also an attorney and started out my career in litigation worked in a litigation firm for just the beginning couple of years and then moved to a transactional practice and what I realized is a small firm is that we were really incentivized to be doing business development and to be kind of specialized and be as efficient as possible and so you know if we were able to streamline our projects and and save time on the stuff that we knew really well and use our own documents then I was really able to leverage that free time to increase our profitability and increase business development and to spend more quality time with clients and so I kind of became obsessed while I was building the law firm with trying to figure out how we could do that in the best way possible and really distinguish ourselves by you know spending more time with clients which was the thing that I really enjoyed doing and providing that unique value and I realized that document automation could be a really key component of that but there just weren't any good tools available there weren't any tools available that let me use my own documents in an easy way there weren't very many tools available to let me use a Mac and we were you know we use a lot of Mac's we wanted to use Macs in our firm and so I just kind of amazed at the lack of available tools to do this thing that I thought you know would be really really impactful in my own firm and then once we kind of started branching out and talking to other attorneys realized you know how how valuable it can be for them and I joined with my co-founder of a head who's a computer scientist and when we started like yeah well yeah I've been following you guys for a long time and the opportunity to teach today's class together is kind of a awesome collision of what I've been seeing in firms for years and now that seeing this technology go live and have it be available today is a massive milestone and and help for everyone so I want to talk for a second about you know what that timeline has been and the difference between document automation and assembly because I think that a lot of the reason why maybe some firms don't adopt is because there's a misconception about what it actually does and so 2010 and prior um giman Automation and the assembly products were really only available to bigger firms or those that could afford server and infrastructure so products that you might have heard such as Hot Docs or I manager you know some of those massive massive massive pieces of software that requires so much support it just didn't make sense for firms to implement them and then you also bring up a great point that Mac users have pretty much been left out in the cold like they haven't had any opportunity to use these products because they weren't web-based it required something that was installed locally on your PC or that required a server environment which is incredibly expensive so the one really standout difference that put you know why on the map and and seeing you guys at a v8 tech show this year was that your cloud-based um and that you've also leveraged you know your machine learning and artificial intelligence to make document automation accessible so you know can you talk a little bit about the technology that you use or that you've put to death there to really bring a historically unavailable solution now into the web yeah sure absolutely so I think one of the things that we're really excited about is because I built a law firm and have experience practicing law myself I kind of have a perspective on technology which is that you know we want technology that works that's easy to use and it's very practical and it just you know works to do the thing that we needed to do as it turns out for document automation you know to get there to get to the place where we have really practical easy to use technology we can leverage AI and machine learning to make the document automation easier so I think one of the things I kind of want to emphasize is that there's a lot of hype right now about AI technology and machine learning and the way that we use that technology is really just to do the thing that we're you know doing better and so the way the like to give you a very concrete example there's many many forms in California thousands of court forms and it's really hard when when programming forms to understand you know what information goes into those forms it's hard for a computer to understand that and so we use the AI to understand that you know the attorney name goes here and the clients name goes here and this is the child's name and this is you know you know the the petitioners name and so forth and we can use that same technology to understand and make it easy to code microsoft word documents so you know law firms have a lot of templates from engagement agreements to letters discovery motions all kinds of things and it traditionally has been very hard to automate those documents because it required a lot of manual tags and so the technology that we've built it's a cloud-based platform and as you mentioned it the technology just makes it really easy to turn those documents into templates you can just use regular language it's very easy to identify what parts the documents change you know wire them together with other parts build logic in the in the advantage to that is that for the end user for people using the software it's just very simple and so we use a lot of kind of fancy technology and my co-founder as a PhD in computer science and worked at Google for a long time but most uh you know is under the hood and what it allows us we're just sort of very practical easy to use technology in your office yeah chicken in and just have it work like your iPhone yeah exactly and so news fancy technology and if anybody is interested in learning more about sort of what's going on under the hood I'm always happy to kind of nerd out and talk about that stuff but I think that one of the things that sets us apart is we actually use that to give a better similar and user experience yeah and that end user experience translates into very real benefits so let's dive into what the difference between document automation and assembly is because they are two different things and so I think complex document assembly is something that you know if you're looking at a massive document you know 30 40 50 60 pages and requires all kinds of dependencies and closets that's more along the lines of document assembly whereas document automation and the demo of what we're gonna see to today is something that you can use for everyday documents everyday forms that takes repetitive tasks and trims them down from manual hours of you know human powered entry to being able to control and automate those documents in a matter of seconds it's the simple merge of information oftentimes driven by a formal library so document automation is you know just be incredibly accessible very easy to implement into daily life whereas document document automation is easy to hold it into everyday life and then document assembly is something that's requires like a little bit more programming and is handles those those complex documents and the overall benefits that solo and small firms see and why you know I've been passionate about this technology since the early 2000s is that it reduces errors and malpractice risks so when you're using the Seguin court forms when you're using the same document over and over and over again and eliminating the risk around having an error or going back maybe even something as simple as a typo in a client's name or an address that's missing one number or doesn't have a west or east or south add it to it it eliminates those because it takes one definitive set of information so the clients name address phone number contact details or case information on and then populates one or more forms documents so on and so forth and we're actually going to see that live today in a quick demo with you but it decreases the overall document preparation time and also what's different about Maya is that you can build a form set specific case type which is something that also has not previously been offered you can create a of documents and then change that clients details or that those case details once and have it populate across the entire form set so just the benefits from a time perspective are clear and evident but it's also the benefits from an error reduction and that malpractice decreasing the risk of malpractice of going back and using the same documents over and over and over again that firms can really see and take advantage of right away and then the next impact is the profitability so I always say you know in my my CL elite classes that if you are doing work that can be done you know by a less expensive resource whether that's technology or maybe it's a paralegal or you know something else that you're robbing your firm of the Delta between your hourly rates and what it would cost to actually do that with a support person or with a piece of technology and to your point earlier Tucker of spending your time on rain making activities or substantive casework or really applying your expertise to the case is what clients come to you for they come to you for those high-value hours and not necessarily you know the completion of paperwork while it is required they're coming to you because you're an expert in what you do yeah and if I could just just add something to that Chelsea I think the other thing for small law firms is that you know most of our business comes from referrals in from relationships and I think that right now there's an opportunity to leverage some of this technology in a way that really makes you stand out among your competitors and among the other firms that do similar work and so that if you can for the same price spend a lot more time and build a better relationship with that client your chances of getting better reviews of getting better referrals of getting more introductions skyrockets and so there's this period of time which I think is really exciting for practicing attorneys where these early kind of adopters of this type of technology suddenly have this massive competitive edge where they're able to distinguish value and then you get a lot better you know introductions and referrals and better clients and so I think that we're in this kind of golden zone right now where there's enough people who are still doing things the old-fashioned way that there's this tremendous opportunity to really distinguish you know yourself and your law firm in terms of client satisfaction and services as well yeah I couldn't agree with you more it is becoming more and more important to treat the delivery of legal services as something that is measured on a customer satisfaction and success and service basis because they're comparing the the relationships that they have with other you know service providers and the things that we use in our daily life to how they interact with the law firm the use of technology the now you know everything from like text message appointment reminders to how efficiently I can schedule an appointment and what are the things that are available for me to do on my own on your website and so you realizing technology and streamlining the way that we work allows you to focus more of your time on those customer service aspects and especially for solos you know the the document automation tools allow you to scale without hiring or if you're in a growing firm you know how can you manage the herbs and flowers of caseload um you know when all of a sudden now an extra few cases come through the door but it's not enough to hire or add an additional person on to the team or how do we give our existing team the resources that they need that they don't feel overwhelmed by the amount of work that has to be done on a daily basis so it's it's a great tool for scaling as well and then some of the most common forms which I know that we're going to dive into here for family law they can be used at every stage of the case and I think you're also going to be showing us an engagement letter as well so I wanted to give just kind of an overview of some of the most popular forums but why yeah clients use on a regular basis and Tucker's gonna actually show us a live demonstration so we can see the tool in action I'm gonna pass presenter control over to you Tucker yeah there we go okay great can you see my screen here yes okay so this is the lawyer website Viacom and you just come here and login we log in and then this is the home screen here and so I'll give you kind of an overview of how the software works I think just one thing I wanted dad Chelsea to kind of your overview is that you know throughout the history of sort of the legal tradition there's always been improvements to how lawyers draft documents and so you know we went from dictation to word processing and from you know WordPerfect to MS Word and so this idea of you know lawyers figuring out how to improve the document drafting process to provide better services for their clients and be better advocates has been consistent for as long as attorneys have existed and so I think that you know this is a really big step forward in that very long tradition and so that's something that I think is always kind of exciting to me personally to see the the improvements over time with document rafting and so so this is lawyer and this is the home screen here and we try to keep it very simple very straightforward the way that lawyer is organized is by clients so you have your list of clients and then clients have projects and projects are just a group of documents that you want to draft together so it doesn't necessarily need to be a matter or a you know mapped anything specific other than for this client I'm going to drop these documents together and law is very very focused on helping people draft documents better and so that's that's as much as there is to it in terms of what the project definition is when you first log in you'll want to create a profile and so you can see here you have a profile you can have a picture you can tell us a little bit about your firm and then this information becomes auto populated across your documents you can have multiple attorneys in a law firm and you can choose the responsible attorney for a given project so there are two two primary ways to use lawyer the first I'll show you is by choosing your documents from our document library and so let's go into John Doe for example and we can add a new project so let's say we want to do a we can start with an engagement ring and put in a case number and we'll go next this is what we call our stack builder so this is where we have over 5,000 court forms all of the local court forms all of the Judicial Council forms some federal forms and then we also have the ability to turn your own internal documents your Microsoft Word documents into templates and so in this example you know I think automating retainer agreements and client services agreements you know it's one of the sort of easiest ways to get a quick win with any law firm because it's very repetitive you can't build for it you know we all have gone through the motions of having to put these together and send them out so just to show you one example you would go into your templates these are custom templates you just add your document you go into populate and you fill out some basic information so let's put it matter 42 let's give the effective date we can make it today and let's make it twenty-five hundred dollars so you just enter in a few bits of information and then law generates your document and so as you can see here we've got you know the matter 42 the case number we've got the hours we've got all the information put into the template and then if we want to go to sign we can very easily send this out directly for signature and so there's a built in a sign tool into law and you can upload your own image so you can see here and we're just using a sample one here but I can put my signature here we can send it out to the client as well and then we'll have a record here so that's one way to use your custom templates another example is that if we wanted to do a entry of judgment for example we can go in and do the same thing where we can go through search these different forms so you know if I wanted to do at the 1:30 I have my up at 1:30 I can see it's added but I can preview the form here make sure this is the right document and I can add it to my selection and so I've pre made this stack of documents here and one of the really nice things about law is you can combine multiple forms into a stack and so rather than drafting these documents one at a time or having them each on their own tab you can simply say these are the documents that I draft together you can arrange them in the right order so that you have you know your documents in the order that you want you can even pull in attachments if you have a PDF with you know an exhibit or an attachment and then you go in to populate mode now this is where we extract all the repeated information across these forms we let you enter the information one time and then the information goes across all your documents so disclaimer here is that I am I am NOT a family law attorney but I've worked with many family law attorneys and we can kind of see how this works and so you go through the populate stage and you fill out all of the information here and once you fill out these blanks you go to go to drafting and you can see that that information goes into these documents and so it'll go across the different documents here and you'll be able to see changes now if you want to make a change so say I wanted to you know change this case number this is just as an example you can see that the box changes color so now that's a broken field so that was originally populated so the information case number went across all these five documents but now I can make a one-off change and now that field is broken so you're really once you populate your stack of documents or your individual document you're really not restricted at all so you can make changes you can edit this just like you would a regular PDF you can cut and paste you can click you know your checkboxes you can type in information and then you can also send the documents out for a sign if you need to one of the things that I think is pretty neat is that you can auto shrink text and you can also add custom fields so for people that have used things like essential forms you've kind of seen this type of functionality and then if we were to continue typing here it'll it'll shrink the text to fit the box so that's one of the nice features and so this is one way to use Lala's to go through the stack builder choose your forms and then fill them out as a group for given client people can have oftentimes have a paralegal take a first pass they can mark the project ready for review it's constantly saving so you don't need to worry about saving it and then you can go back to your client and you can see your different projects and you can see that okay this is ready for my review now one of the nice things about law is that because it's cloud-based there's no dedicated machines there's no cd-rom there's no installation there's no IT maintenance you can access your account from any computer or any device you can use your iPad then you can go to work and be on here computer and then you can have your laptop on a trip there's somebody stick for a day they can still log in and use your forms and then you can log in and follow up with additional edits so there's a collaborative aspect to it kind of access it from anywhere and so I think that's been a big change from you know sort of previous generation cd-rom-based programs now the other thing that you can do is that's the first way to use lawyers to kind of go through and choose your forms the other thing that you can do is you can create template bundles and so as you mentioned Chelsea you can create forms document sets so form sets and you can preload them with you know these different forms and you can even pre check boxes and so you can go in and you can say I'm always going to check you know these three boxes I'm always going to say see attachment here I'm always going to add a custom header I'm always going to do these few things with these different projects since you can save those template bundles and then if you want to use the template bundle you simply click duplicate and then you click your target client which for us is John Doe just and then you duplicate that entire bundle into this client project so now you can go here and you can you know add your case number so forth services for example and then when you go into your into your document here you'll be able to see that the different information will populate across the document so you'll have your pre saved checkboxes and you'll have your information and so forth and to show you again so the way you do is you just create a client here called no family law template bundles you have your forms and if you want to see what information is going to be saved in your template bundle you can see that there's these check boxes that are saved you can have you know sample text that's always saved and so forth so across your documents you can keep the information consistent and then it's just really easy to just reuse you have to choose the documents every time you put in the information every time this would be particularly helpful you know to come up with one case diaper or documents that per case type so that every time you get a new case it becomes part of the process of going into - oh yeah selecting that document set and populating the information absolutely absolutely and we see that particularly in family law where there are very frequent sets of documents that are used you know some of the documents that you showed you know our most used documents and I think that you know family law is particularly well suited for this type of program just because you draft a lot of forms together so you know when you're doing your FL one 30s and fo 144 is and one seventies and one 80s and one 90s you know you can you can count on the you're gonna have a lot of those documents and just to just to show you if we did say that we copied that you know template bundle and then say we wanted to you know remove a document in this case you know we don't need one of these documents you know we can just take that off of the stack and then we can still you know go into our drafting mode and so forth and and go into the into the project and we've now dropped that document so that's that's kind of how you use law and again it's you know create a client then under the client there's projects those are groups of documents you draft you can select from over 5,000 pre-loaded forms or you can upload your own forms if you want to upload Microsoft Word documents you can just drag and drop them into this template here and then we'll release them into your account we also have a Help Center with a lot of helpful information we have live support so if you ever have any questions you can just easily chat us and so it's always gonna be somebody they're available and then for the collaborative aspect I'll just show you really quick how to add people to your account and so when you look here you can just go to subscription so you go settings subscription add seats and then you can just add your different seats and so this way you can add everybody in your organization onto your account and then everybody has their own login and everybody can you know log in do drafts and edit form and have their own clients so so that's that's kind of you know loyal on a nutshell I think that you know what we're seeing a lot of people using more and more is automating their engagement agreements using that signature tool creating these sets of documents and just being able you know lawyers we do these projects a lot right so we become very familiar with them and I think people kind of know what they're doing to where if they can just be more efficient reduce errors you know that gives them a lot of leverage in their practice I guess the last thing I can show actually Chelsea is the integration as well we do have some exciting integrations we have one with Clio and so Clio most people are familiar with is the you know cloud-based billing software and so we let you integrate your account with Clio and it's super easy to do and then you can pull your contacts from Clio into loyal or you can push contacts you created in log into Clio and I can show you how easy it is it's literally one button you say access and there we are so now if I want to go create a new client you can see that Albert Einstein is copying to Clio and I can import from Clio and search for anybody's information you'll see your list of clients and you can just pull them in to log off and I'm gonna grab presenter control back from you and so I've got a couple of extra minutes here if anybody has questions feel free to enter them into the questions pane and while we're in the QA portion I'm gonna put your contact information up here sucker so that people know where to find you you can also try a law off form I'm by going to the website and either starting for for free with your own documents which I highly encourage you to do to give it a try and see how easy it is but then also you can reach out to tucker at Whatcom or Tucker at Vallejo comm is his direct email during today's question and answer one of our first enquiries is Kent how do you see this user can this be used by pro bono or nonprofit organizations that provide legal services yeah absolutely we work with with a lot of pro bono and legal services organizations so you know more than a dozen legal aid organizations and pro bono organizations are using it probably closer to two dozen until absolutely it's a great use case it really helps you to you know be more efficient and help more people we've got a bunch of people who would give great recommendations if you're interested in that miss Romania melon happy to talk to you about it okay and then another question is does the program allow me to access other forms from other areas of law sometimes I get cases that cross over into immigration or probate yeah that's a great question so one of the things that I was frustrated with was this idea of other form kind of software segmenting everything so whether it's segmented by you know this geographical area or this practice area and so we don't do that at all so with your basic lawyer subscription you have access to all 5,000 plus court forms in California that covers probate that covers civil litigation unlawful detainers family law all of the local court forms all of the state court forms and then we also have all federal immigration forms and so we keep those up to date we regularly update them no maintenance and so with with your you know with your account you have access to all of those documents and you can you can search and use them as you like excellent next question when will the family law firms calculate math specifically fl150 and FL 142 that is a great question and one of our most requested features so we're actually working on that now so we will be releasing the map component for the family law forms in the near future so keep an eye out for for updates but that's amazing if they're on your list they'll get an update email when that is available yep that's correct okay right any other questions before we wrap up today's session and if they need help with those you know drag and drop Word documents again there's live support so if you have an engagement letter a retainer agreement something like that that you'd like to drag and drop in there and you want somebody to walk you through it there's a absolute resource to help you do that and in the meantime feel free to oh and then there's another question is there a built-in tracker for the time spent on a project that is a good question we don't have a built-in tracker but I didn't show the ability to record your time so you can record your time and immediately push it into Clio if you have the Clio integration so there's a timekeeping tab that surfaces if you do the Clio integration you can record your time we don't automatically track all the time for you but if that's something you're interested in I'd be curious to hear more about that we're always trying to improve the product and so you know would definitely be open to talking with you alright any other questions from our audience today this presentation has been recorded and will be emailed out to within the next 24 hours so you can feel free to share the recording with any colleagues teammates or contacts that you would think may find it beneficial also feel free to share with lawyers and other practice areas as we mentioned immigration and probate they all of the California forms are available inside of law off so if today's information was valuable to you feel free to send it on to anyone that you might know that could find it also equally helpful and will include contact information for the law team in that email with the recording Tucker any final thoughts or statements before we wrap up today no thank you so much for hosting and great to have the chance to show a little bit more about lawyer and if anybody has any questions happy to talk thanks so much and everybody have a great rest of your day thank you so much for your time thank you