Thomson Reuters Streamlines Legal Document Creation

Thomson Reuters is adding capabilities for drafting, proofing and automating legal document creation in its Drafting Assistant. With the new enhancements, together with Contract Express and Westlaw Form Builder, Thomson Reuters says it is providing a comprehensive set of solutions for legal document creation, streamlining a crucial workflow for the legal profession.

Drafting Assistant now features a PDF converter, which allows any PDF to be converted into a Microsoft Word document, enabling a user to analyze the document with the powerful tools of Drafting Assistant. This is particularly useful when a user wants to closely examine an image-based PDF they received from counterparties, clients or colleagues by running it through tools such as Insert Flags & Links, Deal Proof, or Locate Precedent in order to quickly identify bad citations, optimize clause language and highlight possible drafting issues.

The new version also includes an updated interface that helps users more easily move between features, as well as other Thomson Reuters products, such as Contract Express. Drafting Assistant customers with access to Contract Express templates from their organization’s document automation projects can now access those templates and build documents right from the Drafting Assistant tool pane in Microsoft Word.

In addition, says Thomson Reuters, lawyers involved in transactional practices now have more effective proofreading capabilities with more effective processing of information in Deal Proof, the legal proofreading tool within Drafting Assistant. Deal Proof now analyzes and flags numeration, punctuation, non-conforming phrases, and open issues contained in tables. In addition, any issues that are “flagged” within Deal Proof are now updated with real-time results as the user is making changes to the document. This reduces the amount of time users must spend proofreading and allows users to maintain their drafting rhythm as they work through the list of issues with the freedom to make edits without interruption, instead of having to run an analysis after each change.

More information on Drafting Assistant can be found at http://legalsolutions.thomsonreuters.com/law-products/solutions/drafting-assistant for U.S. practitioners or draftingassistant.co.uk for UK practitioners.