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OSBA document assembly program moving to the cloud
RICHARD WEINER
Legal News Reporter
Published: February 8, 2017
The Ohio State Bar Association has recently upgraded the document assembly program that it offers to its members.
Since 2010, the OSBA has offered its members a PC-based document assembly program through the company HotDocs. HotDocs is now moving to the cloud, calling its cloud-based document assembly HotDocs Market, and the OSBA is following them through its new offering, OhioDocs, said Colleen Evans, the OSBA’s senior director of strategic operations.
The result will open up OhioDocs to all platforms, decrease costs, include automatic updates and make the technology available to many more members, said Evans.
OSBA president Ronald Kopp said that the new OhioDocs will “provide documents more quickly, and add more room to hold them.
The overall idea, said Kopp, is for the OSBA to “do everything that we can to help the small and solo general practitioner to have access to information as if they were a member of a large firm—without having to go to the law library or join a firm.
“It is a part of OSBA’s efforts to provide more and better ways to service the members in the technological age, trying to do the best we can do for small firms to provide information for them to use in their practice.”
“The desktop-based offering was a good product, but it had some limitations,” said Evans, who explained the basic structure of document assembly as it applies to the law office.
“A typical lawyer will draft a document using a base document and making changes to the original,” she said. “This (traditional) process has a high level of error and is also time consuming. Document assembly, on the other hand, generates documents more quickly and accurately. It is a tool that brings a number of increased efficiencies, uses far less time and resources, and produces a faster return on investment.”
Information, she explained, is entered once per client, and then matched with the needed document (say, a divorce complaint).
“OhioDocs has a library of templates. Answer a questionnaire, hit “’assemble,” and the documents comes out in Word or as a PDF,” she said.
Jonathan Hoy, vice president of HotDocs Market, who is based in Dayton, talked about his company’s relationship with OSBA and the new product.
“HotDocs has partnered with OSBA for many years using our software,” he said. “We use a collection of forms to create OhioDocs. These are PDF (or Word)-automated forms so the end user, the OSBA member, answers several questions in a questionnaire to create the document. The magic is the HotDocs software that merges interview questions with underlying forms.”
This creates the contract, or whatever the attorney is writing.
The process is also self-corrective, said Hoy, For example, he said that once one pronoun is changed in one part of the document, it changes in the entire document. So a divorce filing template that uses “his,” can be changed to “hers” throughout the document by just making one change to the form.
Another advantage to the new format is that all updates are downloaded automatically as soon as they are ready, said Evans. Previously, members had to wait for new CDs to be burned.
The forms themselves, said Evans, are from the Ohio Supreme Court and from OSBA committees and experts. The forms and answers are stored in the cloud, although not the actual documents, which are only stored locally. If a user wants to re-access the document from cloud storage, the document itself has to be reassembled from the original in the cloud, although that only requires the touch of a button, said Hoy.
HotDocs itself has a peripheral Ohio connection, said Hoy, who came to the company after a few years at LexisNexis.
“HotDocs was owned by Matthew Bender, and then by LexisNexis when they bought that company,” he said.
HotDocs was sold to its current owner, Capsoft UK, in 2009. The document assembly software program that formed the root of HotDocs was originally a project of Brigham Young University law school, funded at the time by West Publishing. The original release was in 1993.
Along with the new platform, the pricing structure for OhioDocs is also different from its terrestrial progenitor, said Evans.
“The desktop version was based on the number of attorneys per firm, and we had some complaints about that,” she said.
The new pricing structure is simpler, based on the number of people who actually use the software. Prices start at $20 per month per user, or $199 per year, she said.