Even the best writers reuse material from time to time (see this entertaining montage of screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s recycled lines). For businesses and law firms, writing documents and contracts from scratch is incredibly expensive and time-consuming. Instead, maintaining a single master version of a document and revising it for each particular scenario — a process known as document automation — promises huge efficiencies.

We’ve been working with attorneys for over a decade to advance their processes and systems. Based on our experience, we see five reasons why document automation matters most today.

The quality of many solicitations and contracts is amazingly poor. Bad writing, weak and contradictory terms, and sloppy formatting are too common in procurement documents; the result of years of ad-hoc edits, half-completed rewrite efforts and use of word processors to assemble the documents. Poor quality contracts and solicitations increase risk and price, lengthens procurement cycle time, and are a poor reflection on the business.

No one has the time to undertake such a massive rewriting effort. So, most organizations make due with what they have; confusing, inconsistent and costly procurement documents.

For one of the largest electric utilities in the US, Blue Burro developed a complete set of contract and solicitation templates. We began with a mix of paper and electronic documents from prior procurements and a copy of a clause library that existed in a legacy system.

The client team consisted of a group of procurement personnel and general counsel. Through onsite and online working sessions we defined the forms of contracts used for each type of spend.