Document and contract automation is one of, if not, the most accessible of the digital transformation capabilities on the market for any GC and in-house team.

Making legal spend decisions is hard, and choosing supporting technologies for your Legal Operations function is fraught with variables covering change management, resourcing, commercial procurement, product selection, ROI and more; document automation projects fall firmly into this challenge.

In a sector that is renowned for being resistant to changing technology vendors, its worth stating that most document automation technologies are deployed for a lot longer than the initial 3 or 5 year subscriptions. When you add the fact that there are over 200 vendors, each with a proprietary authoring language and no migration tools for document templates that work across the industry, it’s pretty clear that you need to make the right decision in regards to choosing a vendor to partner.

With experience of hundreds of document automation projects, we would like to share with you some pitfalls and some valuable lessons that you should consider before starting your journey. If you have document automation, there are some points of reflection and considerations for the future.

By way of an example, automation projects should not stop once the project transitions into production. Performing maintenance and applying drafting and automation updates for regulation and best practice should be considered mandatory and not optional. If factored into the project at the outset, it’s easier to ensure that your content is always relevant and accurate. How you chose to resource those updates depends on a number of factors.