Earlier this month, London commercial practice Lewis Silkin became the first UK law firm to order the Perfectus document assembly and automation system from the Australian software house Perfectus Solutions.

This was followed by the news that the PISCES software specialist Real Decisions was going to use Perfectus in some of its e-conveyancing applications for the commercial property sector. Then, last week, the London-based legal IT services company Tikit announced it would be reselling the American Microsystems D3 document assembly system in the UK.


Although there is nothing new about the concept of document assembly software - in fact, the Capsoft HotDocs system has been widely used in some UK law firms since the late 1980s - what is interesting about these latest developments is that the technology is now starting to assume a much higher profile. Partners and practice managers seem to be finally waking up to the fact that document assembly is more than just some back-office productivity tool for secretaries, but a potentially strategic technology that could transform the productivity of some departments.


For example, one of the Australian firms that already uses Perfectus reports that the time it takes to put together long documents has been cut by between 30% and 60%.


HotDocs user Morgan Cole says the great benefit is the reduction in the time spent 're-inventing the wheel'; so similar documents no longer need recreating from scratch each time and, if a piece of information - such as a name - is repeated dozens of times throughout a document, it only needs amending once to change all the occurrences.


There is, however, an interesting chicken-and-egg situation here. While the technology has quite clearly come on by leaps and bounds as it has evolved over the past decade, this has coincided with a growing interest in alternatives to time-based billing. Thus, all the while firms could charge for the amount of time they spent on a project, there was little incentive to be unduly efficient because the client bore the financial risk.


Fixed fees change all this, and if a firm is to be able to offer competitive prices and still make a profit, it needs to seriously consider office automation software, such as document assembly.


Charles Christian is an independent adviser to the Law Society's Software Solutions Guide.