Overcoming Resistance to Document Assembly
It’s common for us to speak with an attorney who wants to bring cloud-based document assembly, such as DraftOnce, to his or her law firm, but who wonders how to get other attorneys on board with new technology. Here are three of the most common objections we hear and our suggestions for overcoming them.
1. We bill by the hour. Why would our law firm want to implement a tool that reduces billable hours?
Short Answer: To better serve a larger number of clients.
If it typically takes an hour to put together a standard document for your client, it would only take 10 minutes with DraftOnce. There are two benefits here, increasing client satisfaction and increasing the number of clients you can handle.
The less time spent on searching and replacing in that old standard-document template, the more time can be spent actually focusing on client matters. In other words, from your client’s perspective, you’ve just increased the value added by your law firm. Happy clients become long-term clients and produce new clients through word of mouth.
2. We have some attorneys in our law firm who refuse to give up their Dictaphone/typewriter/shorthand assistant. How can we convince them to change?
Short answer: They won’t change, so don’t waste time trying to get them to change.
Leave them to their old ways. Focus on those who want to try document assembly, look for early wins and use the wins to convince other colleagues who may be on the fence.
Woody Allen still uses a 50-year-old typewriter to write all of his scripts and scissors to cut and paste his scripts together. That may work for Woody Allen. It may even work for a few partners. It won’t be efficient for most attorneys, and it’s no way to compete in today’s legal market.
We recommend beginning with one practice area or type of standard document first and roll DraftOnce out to other areas over time. It’s a transition—it can happen as slowly or quickly as you want.
3. Our documents must be secure and we don’t trust the cloud. Can we just put DraftOnce on our server?
Short answer: The DraftOnce servers are more secure and reliable than your firm’s servers.
Our cloud servers have more security and more redundancy than nearly any law firm could put in place. Using software run from your own servers may seem more secure than a hosted solution, but it’s a false security.
DraftOnce has customers ranging from one-person law firms to the federal government. Our security has been reviewed and accepted for use by large auto companies, nuclear utilities, and many other high-security customers. All of our servers are in the USA. Each DraftOnce account is its own, separate database—that means, your database is walled off from everyone else’s. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest. In short, access to our server is very locked down. If you need more on this, we’re happy to show you or your security firm what we have in place.
Technology is changing how law is practiced. Cloud-based document assembly is a positive change.