Document Assembly on a Mac using DocMoto

One of the best parts of ABA TECHSHOW every year is the opportunity to talk with the vendor to find out what goodies they have in the works. This year, Lee & Neil from DocMoto, showed me their newest feature – document assembly on a Mac! They were also gracious enough to provide the following Guest Post about this new feature:

Simply put, document assembly is the automatic assembling of a document based on rules. Document assembly is popular with lawyers because there is a high degree of repetition in the work they do. The benefits it brings are significant, it can save lots of time, it can reduce error, and it can guarantee that everybody follows consistent rules.

Windows users have had access to a number of powerful (if slightly complex) document assembly tools for years. But for Mac users the choice has been limited. In the latest release of DocMoto, version 3.6 we introduce our own set of document assembly tools that we think will help to bridge the gap between Windows and Mac platforms.

Document Assembly – Essential Requirements

When we set out to implement our document assembly toolkit we set down our key objectives, here they are:

1. Support simple placeholder (merge field) substitution.
2. Support entire blocks of text (snippets) substitution.
3. Support sophisticated nested placeholder substitution
4. Support decision based text or snippet based substitution
5. Support the full feature set of MS Word, so template documents can be as rich as you want.

Lets deal with each in turn:

Simple placeholder substitution

Simple placeholder substitution is the act of replacing a placeholder in a document with a value. A typical example might be {clientName} which is replaced by the client’s name.

Simple placeholder substitution is very similar to MS Word’s merge fields, indeed some practice management systems even use Word merge fields to achieve placeholder substitution.

Snippet substitution

Simple placeholders are only useful to an extent. Before long it becomes apparent that it would be much better if entire blocks or “snippets” of text could be substituted.

DocMoto’s document assembly toolkit supports this. Each snippet is defined as a template in its own right. So snippets can themselves include references to other snippets. Snippets are referenced in a similar manner to placeholders, for example {@standard paragraphs/terms and conditions.docx} refers to a snippet containing the firm’s standard terms and conditions.

Nested placeholders

The ability to nest one placeholder into another allows for very powerful substitution. The idea of nested placeholders is to have a new valid placeholder created by replacing the nested one.  The DocMoto placeholder  {@standard paragraphs/terms and conditions {state}.docx} is an example of a nested placeholder, with {state} being the nested part.

We can use this idea to achieve logic such as inserting the correct terms and conditions snippet for the client’s state.

Decision based substitution

Decision based substitution is much like the familiar “IF THEN ELSE” construct.

For example the following DocMoto instructions change the pronoun within a document based on the sex of the client.

if {sex}=‘Male’ then ‘he’

if {sex)=‘Female’ then ‘she’

else ‘they’

In the above example text (he, she, they) is being inserted, but we could just as easily have created the instruction to insert entire snippets.

Support MS Word feature set

DocMoto uses a native Mac client. That means we can directly access MS Word on your desktop and use that to do the work for us.

The benefit of using Word is that you can create very sophisticated document templates, which will be assembled correctly regardless of complexity. This is in contrast to some systems that don’t use Word to process a document, which can, on occasion result in some unexpected output.

To see document assembly using DocMoto we have published a series of videos. You can find them on the links below:

• Document Assembly – Set Up
• Document Assembly – Essentials
• Document Assembly – Building Documents
• Document Assembly – Using Nested Placeholders