Thomson Reuters Strengthens Document Automation Capabilities for Legal Sector
Thomson Reuters has introduced a new release of Contract Express, its document and contract automation software that is used by law firms and corporations to generate standard legal documents from automated templates avoiding the problems inherent with manual drafting.
Contract Express allows lawyers to automate templates inside Microsoft Word by using mark-up that is akin to marking up a document with a red pen, making it possible for a lawyer to automate a document in less time.
According to Lucinda Case, vice president of strategy at the Legal UK&I business of Thomson Reuters, Contract Express 6.0 further enhances the way law firms service their clients by enabling lawyers to interact with them in new ways, while also delivering cost savings. Solutions such as Contract Express, she notes, can play an integral role in the rapidly evolving legal ecosystem which puts greater pressure on law firms to offer innovative and cost-efficient services.
The new release introduces three key new features - Datasheets, Matters, and Document Versioning – that are intended to advance the way law firms provide self-service documents to their clients. Through the creation of new capabilities, the solution aims to increase the visibility and usefulness of data held in documents, helping to drive greater usability of existing documents and ultimately enabling law firms to expand their offering to the market.
The Datasheets feature enables users to create dynamic views of the transactional information contained in documents created by Contract Express, allowing law firms and their clients to gain deeper insight into their automated documents so they can identify valuable information such as key dates, non-standard clauses, and deal values.
With the new Document Versioning feature, documents created by Contract Express 6.0 are now also fully versioned, enabling users to upload and share manually edited documents with internal users and clients. This feature also gives lawyers greater control over the life of a document, enabling them to gain visibility into those documents that have deviated from the standard Contract Express template.
And finally, the new Matters feature in Contract Express 6.0 makes it possible to group one or more document templates around a specific legal matter. Its new Workflow Steps feature allows template authors to suggest the next template as well as ensure that necessary steps are followed. Documents in a matter can share data across multiple templates.
Contract Express 6.0 also introduces a new code completion capability in Contract Express Author to speed up the creation of templates and improve the quality of resulting documents. Contract Express Author eliminates the need for creating a separate questionnaire, document, and metadata program. After a lawyer marks up their template, Contract Express processes the Word file and automatically generates the questionnaire to guide lawyers and other users through a document.
To learn more about Contract Express, go to www.contractexpress.com.
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