“It’s taken a long time but document assembly is gaining acceptance as law firms realize knowledge re-use in the form of templates has a payback period of a couple of months,” says Chris Pearson, director of O2Smart who have recently launched a document assembly software system called XpressDox Docussembly™.

When templates have been created using a programming environment such as Microsoft® VBA, the obvious risk for a firm is that the programmer leaves and their replacement takes some time to learn how the documents were created. Often it is simply easier for a new developer to create document templates from scratch, thereby nullifying a firm’s investment.