ProDoc - Dec/Jan '02

ProDoc

At first blush, ProDoc appears to be a document assembly application specifically designed for the practice of law. While ProDoc, indeed, handily performs the crucial document assembly function, it actually delivers much more to lawyers.

The primary objective of ProDoc is to provide an efficient means for invoking relevant forms and templates and for answering prerequisite questions that let lawyers focus exclusively on legal issues and to apply professional judgment in the course of practicing law. This objective is accomplished through a sophisticated and legal savvy underlying expert engine.

Pure Logic
The ProDoc engine presents attorneys and support staff with an intuitive interface that is characterized by clear and clean logic second to none. Not much technical skill is required to use this program. Consistent with its ultimate user-friendly philosophy, ProDoc also provides a hand-holding, start-up feature called “The Professor,” which provides beginners with explanations about using dialogs. The dialog for answering questions is so easy to understand, particularly for a knowledgeable lawyer or legal assistant. This feature can be turned off when you feel comfortable with the program.

For a law office inundated with paperwork and challenged by constant document generation deadlines, ProDoc affords an effective solution. Not being satisfied to replace a manual transmission with an automatic transmission for generating documents, ProDoc delivers cruise control.

The user is called upon to establish the legal parameters of the case at hand — to assess a suitable speed limit in view of current traffic and the condition of the road. The ProDoc engine then drives through the invoked templates to generate one or more documents, as appropriate.

ProDoc is organized into a series of volumes that address particular law practice specialties.

For example, the Texas ensemble consists of a number of volumes: Adoption, Attorney-Client Matters, Civil Litigation, Collections, Cor-porations, Criminal Defense, DWI Defense, Family Law, Foreclosures, Guardianships, Landlord/Tenant, Limited Liability Corporations, Probate and more.

A comparable set of volumes is available for Florida law practice. Other optional volumes are available, e.g., Lipman’s Wills & Trusts which is recommended for high-end estate planning. The forms used in these systems are licensed by ProDoc from state bar associations and attorneys in the specific practice area.

Putting It Together
Just how is a document assembled using ProDoc? First, the built-in Contact Manager is invoked by either clicking the “Document Assembly” icon or by selecting the “Assembly” option on the File menu. A client and one or more cases for the client are then specified. Next, the appropriate volume is invoked to provide the available templates for the legal specialty.

To initiate a divorce matter, the Family Law volume is selected. This causes the display of all of the available templates either in numerical or alphabetical order. If the title of the template isn’t obvious, then a search feature can be invoked to quickly locate templates based on certain keywords. After one or more templates are selected, ProDoc walks through a series of dialogs to answer the pertinent questions.

Besides being merged into the selected templates, these answers are stored for future use in conjunction with the Contact Manager. Once ProDoc is satisfied that all of the prerequisite information has been received from the user, the selected documents are assembled and displayed for any refinements that might be appropriate. And voilá, the documents have been generated in record time and with hardly any effort at all. Of course, content and formatting refinements can be made to the assembled document.

As a means of saving time for entering the same or similar information to answer questions during the assembly dialog, or perhaps to refine information in an assembled document, ProDoc provides a QuickText feature.

Quick Tricks
A common use of QuickText is to save blocks of text for insertion into answer dialogs where no simple default value fits. Once the text is typed, a function key or keystroke is selected. Then, when this hot key combination is activated, the saved block of text is inserted into the appropriate slot. Instead of designating a key combination, however, QuickText can be invoked from a pop-up list.

An important aspect of document assembly is establishing default values for recurring questions called global defaults. Once global data has been entered, ProDoc automatically uses it in any volume. Consider a default answer applicable to all documents independent of volume: What is the county in which the transaction is being executed? In Houston, the county would be “Harris.”

Pro-cedurally, either this default county would be specified under the Global Default Answers option of the Setup menu or in the context of answering the question during document assembly (by pressing the Default button). Similarly, defaults can be established on a volume-by-volume basis.

Another default option is to define a Default Answer Set. Such an Answer Set is useful where there are multiple answers to the same question.

A common situation is where there are two or more attorneys from a firm handling a case. The set would have an entry for each attorney, so that individual attorney’s names may be inserted into pleadings. Obviously, defaults and QuickText are great time-savers.

ProDoc’s Setup menu has been designed to make life profoundly simple for users engaging in document assembly and document tracking tasks. Thus, users can select suitable options, system settings and document formatting to automatically invoke the word processor of choice, to name files corresponding to the generated documents, and to place the generated documents into properly named folders — all based on the users’ preferences.

ProDoc has gone even further in the efficiency equation: It provides a series of add-in applets that give lawyers the tools necessary to ascertain and then feed information and answers into the underlying document assembly templates.

For instance, there is an add-in configured as a spreadsheet intended for collecting inventory and accounting information.

ProDoc is delivered on CD with a tutorial consisting of step-by-step slide presentations that effectively emulate the actual document assembly experience. As part of the subscription fee, there is free technical support and free on-site and off-site training.

Updates are distributed at least quarterly to keep ProDoc current with statutory changes and important common law decisions.

Updates are routinely conducted painlessly and fast.

ProDoc Inc.
(800) 759-5418
www.prodoc.com

Price: $55 to $95 for monthly subscription; 10 percent discount for annual payment

Windows 95/98/Me/XP/NT/2000

Reviewed by Al Harrison, patent attorney and intellectual property lawyer, mediator at Harrison & Egbert in Houston

Dec/Jan '02 Issue

PROS
ProDoc provides a comprehensive solution to the vital document assembly function and is easy to use.

CONS
ProDoc is only available for law practice in Texas and Florida and can only be licensed on a monthly or annual subscription basis.

VERDICT
Lawyers practicing in Texas and Florida quickly appreciate the benefits of using ProDoc. Besides maximizing document assembly efficiency and minimizing inherent paperwork infirmities, ProDoc lets lawyers generate legally sufficient pleadings and instruments.