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Cases dealing with internet defamation, invasion of privacy, and copyright infringement have exploded since 2007. Early to the trend, Kenton Hutcherson quickly became very busy. Too busy.
As one of the first internet law firms in the country, helping innocent individuals get their good name back after being attacked online, Hutcherson and his team’s workload escalated with the rising number of cases. He was using a template package but it didn’t have the ability to create custom fields. The so-called solution only created more pain for his team.
“Those templates were extremely barebones, and that’s not how we practice law,” Hutcherson explains.
Working in an emerging field of law, churning out standard work wasn’t an option. He needed a solution that could adapt to the bespoke work the firm was doing for clients. The team needed a tool that could streamline the process.
Hutcherson was using Microsoft Word to create fields, then updating information with find and replace. This meant that, with each modification of standard documents, his team would have tore-enter every field. It was massively time-consuming and couldn’t scale.
The team tried to get around the conundrum by putting all their forms in one big document, but this created terrible inefficiencies — like wasting time with extraneous fields — and fields couldn’t be carried over from one document to another, which meant redoing work over and over again. Plus, they’d still find errors in headers and footers and struggle with constant formatting problems. The initial attempts at efficiency just created more work.
That administrative waste made growth seem impossible. How could Hutcherson Law ride the wave of internet-related legal issues if they couldn’t speed up the creation of legal documents?
Solution
Clio Draft opened up new possibilities for automated document creation at the firm. The platform allowed them to enter information once, using their new standardized forms as a time-saving skeleton. Putting flesh on those bones transformed their previous document templates into a scalable knowledge asset. The return on that investment continues to pay off.
“We can do a deep dive on a particular issue, and develop a template that’s $20,000 of legal work, then reuse it.”
Kenton’s team can leverage the time and effort invested into unique projects to create the groundwork for new areas of opportunity. They enter data once and it’s automatically populated across the necessary documents for those cases. Clio Draft has given Hutcherson Law the time and flexibility that keeps them a step ahead of their competitors, allowing the team to get more done in the same amount of time.
When Hutcherson and his team reuse their work, it takes just minutes to prepare complex documents. And Kenton especially likes how he and his team didn’t need to learn complex code because Clio Draft is so intuitive. He and his staff were able to easily create a library of the firm’s legal documents to be ready with a few clicks.
“For a lot of the cases that we do routinely, we’re able to get those cases filed with a lot less work than if we had started from scratch.”
Results
Using Clio Draft has gotten Kenton closer to his vision of scaling his firm. This requires turning his practice into a document machine.
Whenever a new client needs a set of agreements or a case requires a set of correspondence and motion filings, the automation kicks in. Everything is easily and consistently prepared by his staff. This helps get the product out the door quickly and simplifies the delegation of responsibilities to his staff.
Clio Draft doesn’t just save them time, it helps his entire team adhere to a process for quality control. High-quality documents are essential to every phase of a lawsuit, and Kenton knows his library of firm-specific documents allow him to deliver quickly while avoiding risk of errors. “It is, by far, easier than before,” he says.
That allows him to deliver consistent service at scale.
“We know when we go into a lawsuit, we've thought of everything, and we're going with the best possible case that we can”
Just like Hutcherson’s firm, Clio Draft’s a company that continues to grow and improve.
“That is something that I know is very real,” he explains. “It is a platform that continues to innovate and evolve. I know I’m always getting more.”
