This article originally appeared on the Affinity Consulting May 2013 newsletter on legal technology.

This month’s Affinity newsletter is devoted to document assembly. While the Windows market is dominated by complex soup-to-nuts solutions, including those in which Affinity specializes, the Mac market utilizes more personal, approachable programs.

Fundamentally, document assembly is about not reinventing the wheel. As attorneys, as authors, you already do basic document assembly without realizing it. If you’re a transactional corporate attorney tasked with drafting articles of incorporation, do you fire up Word or Pages, open a blank document, and start typing “Articles of Incorporation”, followed by each subsequent paragraph from your fingertips to the screen? No. You cut and paste from previous incorporation documents you’ve written, make appropriate changes, and review it. You’ve just assembled a document.

Making this Process Easier on Your Mac

Templates

There are several techniques we Mac users can employ to make document assembly simpler, quicker, and less error-prone. In this article, I’ll describe a few of the techniques to do this.

The first, easiest, free, step you can take is to utilize the template functionality of your word processor. Templates are essentially model documents that serve as a starting point for your writing. They also prevent you from accidentally overwriting existing documents. If you have ever opened, for example, the Smith articles of incorporation, made edits, intending to save the revised document as the Jones articles of incorporation, and accidentally hit CMD+S (save) rather than Shift+CMD+S (save as), you’ve just overwritten the Smith articles with the Jones articles. Templates prevent this from happening.

To create a template document, open a blank document in your word processor, copy and paste the text that you want in this “starting point document”, such as your generic articles of incorporation, and then select File > Save As from Word’s menu. Change the format from “Word Document (.docx)” to “Word Template (.dotx)”. Word automatically changes the folder to “My Templates”. Name the file and save it. The next time you want to draft new articles of incorporation, click File > New from Template, click “My Templates” in the list on the left, and select your articles of incorporation template. Word opens a new document for you to edit that contains all of your generic articles. Furthermore, you can save the file without any fear of overwriting a previously-drafted document.

Templates are an underutilized feature of word processors, Mac or PC. If you have any questions about setting up templates in Word, Pages, or another word processor, let me know. I’m happy to help.

Text Clause Libraries

If you’re a Mac user who has never used TextExpander ($34.95) on your Mac or iPhone, you’re really missing out. TextExpander is the best Mac tool for automating the words, phrases, and paragraphs you type every day. Essentially, TextExpander is a good-guy keystroke logger that monitors what you type and replaces your custom abbreviations with whatever text is associated with that abbreviation. For example, if I type ;@jac, TextExpander replaces it with jschoenberger@affinityconsulting.com, my email address, automatically and immediately. TextExpander is like Word’s AutoText feature, but more powerful in that it works in every program on your Mac, allows you to create basic fill-in forms, and even has a companion iOS app that syncs your abbreviations and snippets via Dropbox. With compatible iOS writing programs, you can use the same snippets on your computer and iDevices.

TextExpander can be used for anything that you type – boilerplate “thank you” letters, email signatures, even as a clause or paragraph library for your document drafting. If, for example, you were drafting a will, you could create an abbreviation called “introsingle” that would automatically generate the introductory paragraph of the will for a single testator, with fillable blanks for name and address. Once you begin building your snippet library, typing short key combinations can generate paragraphs or pages of text in whatever app you choose to write.

If you’d like help becoming familiar with TextExpander or building a snippet clause library, let me know.

Automation in the Cloud

While Mac users lack a desktop document automation package, if you rely on Clio or Rocket Matter for your practice management system, both offer document automation utilizing the data you’ve already entered into their respective systems. These automation systems operate similarly to a mail merge in Word. The website takes a template that you’ve uploaded to it, replaces your marked areas with the merge field data that matches that marker and returns to you a document where, for example, “Client Name” is replaced with “John Smith”.

If you are already paying for either Clio or Rocket Matter, explore this powerful functionality. Combined with your custom templates, it can be a remarkable timesaver. If you’re a Mac user interested in cloud-based practice management and document assembly, please contact Affinity for additional information on these products.

Conclusion

Hopefully this article has given you some good starting points for easing document assembly on the Mac. The first tool for making document assembly easier is already on your computer — your word processor. And moving up to additional advanced, but approachable, capabilities is a small step away.

If you have any Mac questions, document assembly or anything else, feel free to contact me.

May 2, 2013