In today's issue of TechnoLawyer NewsWire, lawyer and legal technology legend Dennis Kennedy covers an easy-to-use document assembly program, a new case management program available online or in a client/server format, and a backup utility capable of backing up open database files. Don't miss the next issue.
Below you'll find one of the three articles from today's edition:
I Came, I Saw, I Created Legal Documents
By Dennis Kennedy
All legal documents are created in one of three ways — staring at a blank page, using an existing document as a model, or using document assembly software. A classic trilemma, staring at a blank page means you have to reinvent the wheel, using a model is prone to embarrassing copy and paste errors, and document assembly software is difficult to set up.
Fortunately, someone forgot to tell Esquire Innovations about document assembly software being difficult to set up. Esquire's iCreate 4.0 comes out of the box with many useful templates ready to go, including letters, memos, fax cover sheets, pleadings, agreements, Bates labels, address labels, envelopes, etc. You can easily tweak these templates as you see fit such as adding your logo and lawyers to your letterhead.
Of course, you can also use iCreate to build your own templates for any document type. The design philosophy behind iCreate is to enhance Microsoft Word (and Excel and PowerPoint), not force you to learn something entirely new. Nowhere is this philosophy more apparent than with iCreate's iHyperstyles Toolbar, which iCreate adds to Word. The iHyperstyles Toolbar turns the daunting and difficult job of working with Styles in Word into a much simpler process that enables your firm to standardize its approach to document formatting.
With the iHyperstyles Toolbar, everyone in your firm can create, modify, apply, and manage styles and paragraph numbering in Word. From the toolbar, you can create new numbering schemes and save them for use on other documents, apply headings, simplify the creation of tables of contents and authorities, and of course apply formatting. You can also apply multiple styles and numbering schemes in the same document, automate the handling of paragraphs, and clean up manually-typed documents.
iCreate's other features include QuickMerge, which integrates with the address books of Outlook, GroupWise, Lotus Notes, and InterAction to make the insertion of contact information seamless, iCreate Label, which creates any imaginable label size, icCalendar, which can grab an Outlook calendar and place it in Word, and iBatesLabel for Bates stamping.
As you might expect, iCreate integrates with popular document management systems such as Hummingbird, InterWoven, NetDocuments, and Worldox.
The company offers two purchasing options. If you need a full-blown document assembly tool for creating templates, you can of course purchase iCreate, which includes the iHyperstyles Toolbar. If you just want to make Word's Styles easier to use and standardize them across your firm, you can purchase the iHyperstyles Toolbar by itself. Learn more about iCreate and the iHyperstyles Toolbar.
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