Best of The Exari Blog, Part 5

About this series: The Exari team has worked for nearly five years to make this blog a complete resource for information about contracts and document assembly. With more than 180 published articles, we thought we would introduce our newer readers to the most popular articles from the archive.

The year 2010 marks the 10th anniversary of Exari's founding in Melbourne, Australia (officially, December, 1999). Back then, Exari's founders saw the potential for XML to deliver a more powerful, controlled approach to automated contract drafting, and in 2001 Exari released the world's first online document assembly system built on Java and XML.

Today, Exari is the only enterprise document automation solution that can easily automate all documents across the business document spectrum from highly complex to interactive to high volume communications.

Below are the most read posts of 2010.

1) How to Ensure Your Document Assembly Project Fails
As with all IT projects, there are a number of sure-fire ways to send a promising document assembly initiative off the rails. And that's regardless of how good the technology is. So, what can you do to turn a great idea into an unmitigated disaster?...read full post

2) MS Word Patent Infringement: Is Your Document Assembly Investment At Risk?
We've been getting asked one question with increasing regularity over the past couple of months. How is Exari affected by Microsoft Word's patent infringement? SHORT ANSWER -- We're not affected at all...read full post

3) Why Complexity Matters
Einstein once said that everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. And so it is with document automation. Everyone wants to make it as simple as possible. But anyone who tells you that it is simple (presumably by consuming whatever snake oil they are selling) is lying. Some document composition tasks are, by their very nature, highly complex, and some will make your head hurt. The challenge is to find the simplest and most effective way of dealing with them, so that you can fully reap the rewards of automation. Which begs two obvious question: what do we mean by complexity and does it affect your documents?...read full post

This is the final post in our "best of" series. We hope you have enjoyed looking back at the highlights of the first five years of The Exari Blog. We'll be back in two weeks with a new post. While you're waiting, why not try the software?

Photo credit: flymissy

Best of The Exari Blog, Part 4

About this series: The Exari team has worked for nearly five years to make this blog a complete resource for information about contracts and document assembly. With more than 180 published articles, we thought we would introduce our newer readers to the most popular articles from the archive.

2009 was marked by a period of rapid expansion for Exari. Armed with a sizable investment from Beacon Equity Partners, Exari was poised to take on new clients, release new document assembly products, and expand its management team. In response to the company's growth, Exari’s US headquarters was relocated to Boston’s Back Bay. According to Exari President, Terence Lee, “We have virtually doubled in size over the past year. We are bringing on more staff to support the increasing demands of our existing customers and a sizable number of new customers.”

Below are the most read posts of 2009.

1) Death by Laptop
For those of us enjoying the benefits of laptops and mobile storage gadgets, it's easy to overlook the risks. But as a recent article in Law Technology News points out, the risks are high, and the consequences of ignoring them rather scary. They cite two headline grabbing incidents to drive the point home…read full post

2) Document Assembly Solution: How to Decide Build Vs. Buy?
OK, everyone now agrees; your current way of creating documents is broken (too slow; full of errors; impossible to maintain). So, how do you fix the problem? Do you build your own system, or do you buy something off-the-shelf? There are pros and cons of both approaches. But first things first; before you can make a Build-vs-Buy decision, you need to work out your requirements. You quickly discover that requirements gathering and analysis is hard...read full post

3) Five Document Assembly/Legal Technology Blogs to Follow
If you are interested in document assembly and other legal technologies, which you probably are since you are reading this, here are some other blogs you may want to check out…read full post

Stay tuned for the final post in this series coming next week.

Photo courtesy of Nina Matthews Photography

Best of The Exari Blog, Part 3

About this series: The Exari team has worked for nearly five years to make this blog a complete resource for information about contracts and document assembly. With more than 180 published articles, we thought we would introduce our newer readers to the most popular articles from the archive.

2008 was a major year in Exari’s history. In April, Beacon Equity Partners LLC announced that it would award Exari an investment of $10 million. At that time Beacon Chairman, Ed Mullen said, “We spent a year carefully evaluating the players in this field and we believe Exari is by far the leader. They have an amazing technology solution that delivers huge benefits to clients. With a great patented product and strong teams in the U.S., Australia, and the UK, we’re looking forward to an immediate surge in growth in 2008-2009.”

Exari opened a U.S. headquarters in Boston shortly after that, and did in fact experience rapid growth in both new customers and personnel. Here are the most popular articles from The Exari Blog in 2008.

1) Why Law Departments Struggle to Improve Productivity
As mentioned in a previous post, the ACLA/CLANZ Legal Department Benchmarking Report 2008 found that Australian and New Zealand general counsel overwhelmingly view workload / time pressure as the most pressing issue they face.
However, relatively few law departments manage to improve their productivity and thereby reduce the workload of their lawyers...read full post

2) In House Lawyers are the New Black
In house lawyers are back in vogue. For the first time in years, more GCs plan to hire extra in-house lawyers than not. Indeed, just under half of all GCs surveyed (49%) in the latest Altman Weil Chief Legal Officer Survey (2008) are planning to beef up their internal legal teams. Which is great news for corporate counsel.
But bad news for law firms. For while in-house spending is on the way up, "out-house" spending is under the knife, and some firms are facing the bullet...read full post

3) Benchmarking Data for Australasian Law Departments
In the United States, legal industry consultants have been publishing law department benchmarking reports for years. (See, for example, the annual law department surveys produced by Hildebrandt and Altman Weil.) Such reports provide the proactive general counsel with lots of useful information for analyzing the current performance of his or her department against that of industry peers and taking corrective action where appropriate. Unfortunately, similar data is far less common for legal departments in other countries...read full post

Photo courtesy of ThrasherDave

Best of The Exari Blog, Part 2

About this series: The Exari team has worked for nearly five years to make this blog a complete resource for information about contracts and document assembly. With more than 180 published articles, we thought we would introduce our newer readers to the most popular articles from the archive.

Part 2 of this series finds us revisiting posts from 2007, a big year for Exari. We shipped version 5 of the software which introduced "Roundtripping," a groundbreaking development in the field of document assembly.

Never before could a document produced in a document assembly system go through a process of negotiations (typically in Word) and be "round-tripped" back into the system in a way that preserved any negotiated changes. This meant you could save the answers given during assembly, as well as the edits made during negotiations, and re-use them against the same template. To this day, Exari is the only document automation provider offering this ability.

Now, without further ado, here are the most popular articles from the Exari Blog in 2007.

1. The Sweet Spot of Document Assembly:
Why are so many people embracing document assembly now when they didn't in the past?
The answer, we think, is that web-based document assembly tools have matured to the point where it's now practical to automate more than just consumer-oriented, high-volume, fill-in-the-blanks, standard forms. People are discovering that a large chunk of their business-to-business deals fall into a new category of "semi-standard" contracts. They're not standard form. But they do follow predictable patterns of negotiation and drafting. They do follow rules. And this is the new sweet spot for automation... read full post

2. Award Winning Document Assembly Solution:
A decade ago, in his best selling book, The Future of Law, legal technology seer, Richard Susskind, predicted that one day: "lawyers will embody their document drafting know-how in packages which will become a form of marketable information service..." read full post

3. What’s Happening to Hummingbird?
Historically, the two main document management systems (DMSs) used by large law firms have been Interwoven Worksite and Hummingbird Enterprise - DM.
In October 2006 Hummingbird was acquired by Open Text. At the time, John Wilkerson, Open Text's EVP, Global Sales and Services assured Hummingbird customers via an open letter that:
"the combined company will provide you with the best products, solutions, service and support to address your most pressing business issues..." read full post

We hope you're enjoying this series. Watch for the final three installments in the weeks to come. And please, vote for your favorite posts in the comments.

Photo courtesy of Muckster