The Exari Blog

Is your department over-lawyered, under-lawyered, or just right?

2013-05-13T16:34:00.003-04:00

For the second consecutive year, in conjunction with General Counsel Metrics, LLC , we are pleased to invite you to take part in the fourth General Counsel Metrics Law Department Benchmark Survey. It had more than 1,000 total participants last year, each of whom enjoyed access to valuable benchmarking data coming out of the survey.

There’s no cost to participate, and the confidential survey should only take a few minutes. Simply enter a few facts and figures about your 2012 legal staff and spending (# of lawyers, paralegals, and other staff; in-house and external legal spend; revenue). There are also a couple of technology questions, such as which contract management software you use. Only aggregated and normalized information is published, such as median lawyers per billion dollars of revenue.

In early June, all participants will receive the first release of the report, which is expected to cover about 300 law departments and include about 60 pages of benchmarking data on legal department staffing, compensation and spending.

Please click here to take the survey.

If you have questions about the survey you can Rees Morrison, President of General Counsel Metrics. If you'd like more information on Exari Contract Management Software, please visit the Exari website at www.exari.com.

eBook: Contract Management Maturity Assessment

2013-03-21T09:54:00.000-04:00

Where is your company on the Contract Management Maturity Assessment Model?

Have you ever wondered how effectively your company manages its documents? At what stage in the contract lifecycle are your processes most inefficient? And how different are your contract management practices from those of best in class companies?

Our new eBook, Exari Contract Management Maturity Assessment, will answer these and other questions you may have about contract management practices. It will help you to:

Evaluate the efficiency of your company’s contract management process
Mitigate risk-prone areas
Identify quick wins for shortening your contract cycle time

The Assessment Model provided in the eBook outlines the seven stages of contract lifecycle and three levels of contract management maturity: leaders, followers and laggards.

The differences are stark. For example, the document creation process may vary from copying and pasting from old deals manually to using a guided, web-based interview with predefined alternative language approved by Legal.

The first, laggard practice makes it difficult to enforce document quality, consistency, compliance and risk management. The latter process, used by leading companies, allows business people and junior legal staff to lower risk and to create compliant documents up to ten times faster.

To learn more about contract management, please click here.

Mills & Reeve Selects Exari for Document Assembly

2013-03-11T09:27:00.000-04:00

Mills & Reeve, a leading UK law firm, has chosen Exari to automate its most-used employment precedent after a competitive selection process.

Exari’s robust and easy to use document assembly software allows both Mills & Reeve’s own lawyers and external clients to draft tailored compromise agreements using the same bank of standard clauses.

Nicola Brown, a partner at Mills & Reeve and a specialist in employment law, said: "We chose Exari because it enables us to present complicated drafting options in a flexible and simple way. The efficiencies we introduce by automating the drafting of compromise agreements include ensuring accuracy and speed of creation. This is allowing us to further raise our client satisfaction levels.”

“In addition, some of our clients have direct access to the automation. This enables them to complete the simpler transactions themselves and only refer to us for the more complex cases. It’s a powerful tool for cementing existing relationships and developing new ones.”

Geoff Maskell, Exari’s Vice President of European Sales, said: "With Exari, Mills & Reeve will now be able to deliver tailored agreements to its clients faster than ever before. By using Exari for contract drafting, law firms can achieve faster turnaround times, improved business focus and produce consistent, error-free documents, which help strengthen client relationships."

We are pleased to welcome Mills & Reeve to the Exari Community and look forward to helping them achieve their goals. To learn how you can streamline your compromise agreements or other document intensive process, please contact us.

The Latest and Greatest Document Assembly

2012-11-05T15:55:00.000-05:00

Apologies for the headline, but we're excited about the release of Exari Document Assembly Software Version 6.1. It's available now and has more than 200 new features that enhance the system’s capabilities from document creation through negotiation, storage and obligation management.

The powerful combination of patented document assembly and contract management provides document compliance and data visibility for the legal department and sales/revenue acceleration for sales executives.

With this release, Exari continues to deliver on the mission of transforming the enterprise with “intelligent documents.”

• Legal Departments have the ability to deliver self- service contracts to the business without added risk. Microsoft Word – only systems don’t provide necessary control for self-service or the power to support complex deals. Legal also benefits from automated approval workflows and collaboration tools. Exari offers the power needed to overcome any level of document complexity.

• Sales Departments benefit from shorter contract turnaround times and the ability to close deals faster, CRM integration, and tailored output – PDF for contracts, PowerPoint for proposals and dynamically generated presentations, and Word for pitch books, letters, and customized documentation.

• IT Departments appreciate the flexibility and ease of integration with other in-house systems. Vital contract data is accessible across the business and can feed off and into other systems.

GC Metrics Survey Includes Contract Management Software

2012-10-18T06:16:00.000-04:00

In conjunction with General Counsel Metrics, LLC, we invite you to take part in the world’s largest benchmark survey. More than 800 companies have done so already this year.

For the first time, this year's GC Metrics Survey will include a question about Contract Management software. Respondents will be able to see how many of their peers have automated their contracts process and which software packages are in use across legal departments.

In early December, GC Metrics will send participants the fourth release of the report, with 25 benchmarks on legal department staffing and spending, as well as compensation data. There is no cost to complete the quick, confidential survey. All respondents will receive the final report - Click here to take the survey.

Simply enter your six 2011 figures on staff and spending (lawyers, paralegals, and other staff; inhouse and external legal spend; revenue). Only aggregated and normalized information is reported, such as median lawyers per billion dollars of revenue.

If you have questions about the survey you can contact Rees. If you'd like more information on Exari Contract Management Software, please visit the website at www.exari.com.

Big Data and Document Automation

2012-10-04T10:47:00.005-04:00

"Big Data" is a hot topic these days, especially amongst those charged with business and regulatory compliance. Wikipedia defines Big Data as "a collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using on-hand database management tools." The article goes on to say that, "The challenges include capture, storage, search, sharing, analysis."

For many companies, including but not limited to financial institutions, much of the data they need to report on is buried in their contracts. These contracts can be very complex documents. Looking at the challenges listed above, the first is "capture." If the data from contracts is being captured by re-keying data points into a database, the margin for error is very high, not to mention that it's a costly and time intensive undertaking. In order to keep costs down, you may look to inexpensive, untrained resources to handle the task. In that case, the error rate goes up.

By automating your contracts process you eliminate manual re-keying of data. With an enterprise document assembly solution, all of your data is automatically captured as you create your contracts. When integrated into a contract management solution, the data is stored, searchable, and available for analysis in one system, thereby addressing three of the additional challenges. With a contract automation solution such as Exari, that data and the documents are also shareable (the final challenge) through a number of tools such as sites, wikis, discussions and blogs.

Documents contain by nature, unstructured data. By storing the completed document in a contract management system, you can utilize full text search to suss out the data you need. However, if you automate the creation of those documents in the same system, the data points also become available as structured data. This simplifies any necessary reporting, whether to board members, shareholders or regulators.

To see how Exari's document assembly and contract lifecycle management solutions can help with your data burden, request a demo.

Enterprise Document Automation

2012-09-20T10:12:00.000-04:00

When choosing an enterprise document or contract automation solution, it's important to consider the full spectrum of documents across the company; from complex contracts for legal, to employment agreements for HR, to finance documents for the CFO, to customer communications for marketing.

Ideally you can find one product that meets all of your document automation needs and integrates easily with your existing infrastructure. Being able to use one solution that works for multiple business units not only improves your ROI, it lowers support costs and reduces the demands made on over-burdened IT departments.

IT also benefits from a document automation solution that is "platform independent." The ideal solution will work, not only, within the current system and application environments, it won't tie you to legacy systems that may no longer be the best choice or constrain future requirements. CRM, databases, ERP, and pricing engines are common systems that enterprises look to integrate with their document automation solution.

For end users, adoption is paramount. The easier a product is to use, the better, so look for a solution that requires no software downloads - users simply need a standard web browser (such as Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari) to complete a wizard style interview and generate customized output documents from any Internet-enabled device.

Click here to learn more about what IT departments should look for in a document automation solution. To learn more about Exari document automation visit www.exari.com.

Exari Will Exhibit at ISDA’s Mid-Year Conference

2012-09-06T10:44:00.000-04:00

We are attending and exhibiting our document automation software at the ISDA Mid-Year Conference in London on September 20. ISDA, the International Swaps and Derivatives Association, Inc., is the global trade association for OTC derivatives and maintainers of the industry-standard ISDA documentation.

We’re looking forward to meeting with several of our investment banking clients while we’re in London. We will also meet with potential clients and demonstrate our document assembly and contract management solutions for automating and managing Master Agreements. Over the past couple of years, we’ve become the solution that the investment banking community turns to for automating and extracting data from derivatives documentation, and ISDA is the association that sets the standard for that documentation.

If you are interested in learning more about how to improve your derivatives documentation process, contact us and we will show you how to streamline the process to reduce your risk. And if you’d like to arrange a meeting at the ISDA Conference, please contact Paul Nelmes.

Exari Launches Document Assembly User Group

2012-08-16T10:02:00.002-04:00

This week marks the launch of our online document assembly user group. It takes the form of a Linkedin subgroup of the Exari Community called the Exari Power Authors User Group. As the name implies, it will bring together professionals who are authoring templates for their organizations.

The group is private and membership is by invitation only. To be eligible, you must be a template author at a current Exari client. If you, or someone you know, in your organization is an Exari Power Author and would like an invitation, please contact us or ask your account manager. You can also go to the group on Linkedin and request to join.

This online user group provides a forum where Power Authors can share knowledge, stay up to date with new features of Exari Document Assembly, take advantage of special offers such as members-only webinars and get an early look at upcoming software versions.

In addition to Power Authors, experienced members of the Exari team are also part of the group. They will participate in discussions, host webinars, and post tips and shortcuts to enable group members to get the most out of Power Author.

We appreciate the input we have received from our authors that have helped to shape this group. Keep the feedback coming so that we can continue to help you maximize the value of your document assembly initiative.

Exari Document Assembly - Authoring Tools

2012-08-02T08:31:00.000-04:00

In this video, Exari Co-Founder and CTO Justin Lipton, explains the basics of authoring in Exari. Exari provides two different authoring tools – Instant Author and Power Author.

Instant Author allows users to create document templates via their web browser, without the hassle of downloading software or installing plug-ins. Instant Author allows users to take an existing Word template and upload it into Exari and requires no programming skills or understanding of macros. Authors can automate documents quickly without needing to know anything about the underlying architecture.

Power Author, Exari’s desktop authoring application, provides unprecedented flexibility and power to handle complex concepts such as smart list handling and logic visualization. Power Author enables users to create complex documents, forms, clauses and groups of documents. Any changes to those documents can be seen instantly in the interview or in the output documents, in multiple formats.

To see how Exari can streamline your document creation process, request a demo.

Real Estate Document Creation

2012-07-26T10:12:00.000-04:00

Hopefully it's a sign of an improving economy, but we have definitely noticed an uptick in inquiries from several sectors of the commercial real estate business. Makes sense, since real estate can be very document intensive. And when business is good, you don't want your document creation process to slow your growth.

Automated document creation or "document generation" can help commercial real estate services firms to:

Improve business process efficiencies
Further accelerate revenue growth and
Reduce operational costs

Real Estate documents especially suited for document automation include:

Leases
Term Sheets
Appraisals
Contractor and Subcontractor Agreements
Loan/Finance Documentation
Facilities/Property Management Contracts
Syndicated Lending Agreements and more.

For more information or to see our real estate document automation and management system for yourself, request a demo.

Managing Complex Contracts - New Report

2012-07-12T08:08:00.000-04:00

At the recent IACCM EMEA Forum, we conducted a workshop with Devant, a specialist commercial contract creation, negotiation and education consultancy, entitled, "Managing the Spectrum of Complexity," and have compiled the outputs into a new report.

Over fifty delegates, including contracts and commercial professionals from many global organizations like Accenture, IBM, Panasonic and Schlumberger, attended the event. The objective of the workshop was to identify common causes and consequences of contract failure, and to work with the group to identify potential mechanisms to avoid such failures in the future.

The report summarizes the findings from this workshop, discussing the top contract problems plaguing the group:

1. Unclear scope
2. Poor change management
3. Revenue leakage & margin erosion
4. Payment disputes
5. Poor understanding of risk

The report also includes three short case-studies of complex contract cases gone awry:

• De Beers v Atos Origin
• BskyB v EDS
• British Gas v Accenture

You can download a complimentary copy of the report here.

Ending the HR Document Pile-up [Recorded Webinar]

2012-06-29T14:54:00.000-04:00

Human Resources is a document intensive field. HR professionals in companies with large workforces, high employee turnover and/or global offices, end up devoting a significant amount of time to necessary but low-value paperwork.

Exari sponsored a webinar to show how HR departments, swamped with paperwork, can get back the time to perform higher value work by automating their documents. You can view the recording here.

Document automation helps HR departments reduce the time it takes to create essential HR documents like offer letters, consultant contracts, warning letters, COBRA notifications and more. Add in contract management, and HR managers can gain fingertip access and complete visibility into new and existing documents.

In addition to outlining the best types of HR documents to automate, the webinar included a demonstration of Exari's Document Assembly and Contract Management products for HR professionals. If you would like to learn more, request a recording of the webinar here, or to see the solution in action, request a demo.

Technical Briefing: Exari Architecture Explained

2012-06-14T08:52:00.000-04:00

In this video, Justin Lipton, Exari Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO), explains the power of Exari’s architecture:

With Exari’s Document Assembly Solution, users create documents using an intuitive interface and a standard web browser, without the hassle of downloading software, add-ons or plug-ins.

Built on Java and XML, Exari’s patented technology allows authors to create documents as native XML without any knowledge of XML or programming. In addition to the documents, the rules and styles also exist in XML. This architecture allows authors the ability to create templates containing highly complex logic using easy to use interfaces and tools. So, business analysts, lawyers, and other non-technical staff can create and maintain automated documents in Exari, without depending on IT.

Unlike most Word-based document assembly solutions, Exari does not rely on any proprietary document format. By design, Exari’s architecture is 'Word-compatible' but not 'Word-dependent'. Exari delivers documents and contracts in your choice of Word, PDF, HTML or XML formats. To see for yourself, request a demo of Exari today.

Exari Team Runs Lawyers Have Heart

2012-06-07T17:24:00.001-04:00

Exari fielded a team of runners last week in Boston for the 5th Annual Lawyers Have Heart 5K Road Race. This is the second year that we have supported the race, which raises critical funds for the American Heart Association (AHA).

This year, 1,700 people took part in the race and helped raise over $200,000. Many Boston law firms, including Exari document assembly clients participated in the event.

At Exari we understand the pressure that both corporate and law firm lawyers are under and create document assembly and contract management solutions that ease that pressure by streamlining the contract and document creation process.

Exari’s contract solution results in faster turnaround, improved business focus, and consistent, error-free documents in legal departments and law firms across the globe. To see how Exari can eliminate stress from your day, request a demo to see the contract management solution in action.

HR Document Automation Webinar

2012-05-31T07:19:00.000-04:00

Human Resources is a document intensive profession, but you can end the HR document pile up by automating your documents. Join us for an informative web-seminar on Thursday, June 21 and learn how document automation can alleviate the burden of creating important HR documentation. The webinar will be recorded and shared with all registrants for you to watch at your convenience.

HR documents from candidate evaluation forms, offer letters, employment contracts, confidentiality agreements, non-compete agreements and equity agreements, through to exit interviews are excellent candidates for automation. In addition to creating documents quickly, automation helps you reduce errors and increase compliance. Register now to learn how.

In this webinar you will learn the:

Best HR documents to automate
Process of implementing an HR solution
Benefits of integrated document automation

For more information on HR document automation visit www.exari.com/solutions/Human-Resources.html.

How to Comply with Dodd Frank Challenges

2012-05-24T15:00:00.000-04:00

With July and October deadlines approaching, investment banking professionals are thinking about what you'll have to do in order to comply with Dodd Frank regulations. Legal, documentation, risk management, credit and collateral professionals all face challenges managing risk and streamlining processes. You need to respond quickly to market events and have in place consistent risk management procedures. Exari helps you meet these challenges by:

Generating ISDA Master Agreements quickly
Capturing data from legacy agreements
Automating the amendment process
Increasing visibility across your entire portfolio
Improving compliance

Exari's Derivatives Software is used by top investment banks to improve visibility into key terms within existing agreements. And, document automation streamlines the generation of high quality documentation including:

ISDA Master Agreements and Credit Support Annexes (CSA)
Global Master Repurchase Agreements (GMRAs)
Global Master Securities Lending Agreements (GMSLAs)
Sign-off sheets
International FX and Currency Option Master Agreements (IFXCOs)
Prospectuses, Term Sheets and Final Terms for Structured Products
Trade Confirmations.

If you're an investment banker and want to reduce the risk in your documents or produce them faster, and need to increase compliance, contact us today and we'll show you how.

Document Automation Q&A

2012-05-03T08:29:00.000-04:00

The audience at a recent Exari webinar entitled, "Introduction to Document and Contract Automation," asked lots of great questions. We are sharing some of them with you here, along with the answers, because we realize that you may have the same questions yourself.

Q: Are changes by users to the documents audited? How is this represented?

A: There is an audit trail on all templates, so you know when the templates were changed and by whom. This is tracked via new versions of each template, and authorized users can go back to view previous versions. There is also an audit trail on transactional documents created and saved in the contract management system, with details of who saved each version and when.

Q: How do you handle negotiation with an external counterparty?

A: Typically our customers prefer to exchange Word documents when negotiating with external counterparties. Exari can output Word documents and versions of those documents can be stored in the central Contract Management repository. Exari also has a feature called Round Tripping where negotiated documents are compared to the document you last sent out, and a true redline of the document is presented to the user, making it clear which clauses were edited during negotiations. Round tripping works whether or not the user has turned on "track changes" in Word. This makes it easy to flag when specific high risk clauses were changed, and also makes it easy to synchronize the final set of contract data used for reporting.

Q: How does the repository portion of the application handle contracts that are not created through the wizard (i.e. 3rd party paper or legacy contracts)?

A: Other people's paper can be uploaded, with the metadeta, to the contract repository and shared in a central place. Many customers will also perform a human review using the Exari wizard to capture key data points from the contract. This approach streamlines the ""playbook"" approach to negotiation, prompting the user on specific issues based on their answers, and presenting them with a list of useful clauses to negotiate into the document.

Q: Can answers to the interview questions be exported so they can be read by other systems?

A: Yes. You can integrate both the document assembly and contract management solutions with any other in-house systems you have, such as CRM, ERP, CMS, database, billing, business intelligence system, etc. You can integrate both upstream and downstream, enabling you to pull information into an interview or push answers out.

If you have other questions about document assembly or contract management, you can ask us here.

Document Assembly and Contract Management Explained

2012-04-19T06:04:00.001-04:00

In an effort to "demystify" document assembly and contract management, we recently hosted a webinar outlining some basic concepts. You can view a recording here.

Among the topics we covered during the first part of the presentation were, the:

* Best types of documents to automate
* 8 Steps in the Contract Lifecycle
* Process of implementing a solution
* Benefits of integrated contract automation

The second part of the one hour webinar consisted of a demonstration of Exari's Document Assembly and Contract Management solutions, and a Q&A with the very engaged audience.

We ended up running out of time, but answered the remaining questions via email. If you have questions after viewing the recording, please send them to contact@exari.com.

Lloyd’s lists Exari as Technology Vendor

2012-04-05T08:41:00.002-04:00

We are pleased to announce that Lloyd’s, the world’s specialist insurance market (formerly known as Lloyd’s of London), has included Exari as a technology vendor in its new Tools and Resources Guide. The Resources can be found on the Lloyd’s website under “The Market” section. You can see Exari’s listing here.

Exari's insurance document creation solution gives underwriters and brokers a fast and agile way to create and compare quotes, accelerate the placement cycle, produce complex policies and wordings, automate endorsements and renewals, and streamline product configuration. All of the data captured during the document creation process is available for reporting and analysis.

Novarica’s Matthew Josefowicz is quoted in the cover story of last month’s Best Review as saying, ”A few trends will begin to have a big impact on the industry, he added. “The most important one is being able to leverage the massive proliferation of data in order to streamline underwriting and claims adjusting.”

Exari automatically captures data from the document during the assembly process, ensuring that every piece of critical data, and the context of that data, is extracted as insurance documents are created. Exari’s rule driven document assembly engine can create triggers from the same data that is used to create the document.

If you’d like to see how Exari can streamline your insurance document processes, request a demo.

Introduction to Document Assembly and Contract Management [Webinar]

2012-03-29T07:06:00.006-04:00

Will implementing a contract management solution improve your bottom line? Does document assembly software speed up your time to contract? Which solution is most cost effective for your document types?

At Exari, we understand that researching and choosing a document automation solution can be a time-consuming process with lots of questions. To make the process easier for you, we invite you to attend our upcoming webinar which will provide an overview of document and contract automation. Update: The webinar took place on April 12. You can register here to view the recording.

Title: Introduction to Document and Contract Automation
Date: April 12th, 2012
Time: 11AM to 12PM EST

In addition to an overview and demo of Exari’s Document Assembly and Contract Management products, this educational one-hour webinar will highlight some customer use cases and provide insight into the:

Best types of documents to automate
8 Steps in the Contract Lifecycle
Process of implementing a solution
Benefits of integrated contract automation

The webinar will be followed by an interactive Q&A session and will be recorded. All registrants will receive a copy of the recording to view at their convenience. You can register here to view the recording.

Exari to Exhibit at Upcoming Contract Management Conferences

2012-03-15T07:58:00.002-04:00

We will be exhibiting Exari Document Assembly and Contract Management solutions at two upcoming industry conferences. If you'll be attending either, please stop by to say hello and see what's new. If you haven't yet registered and would like to attend, we can provide you with discount codes.

We will be at InsideCounsel's 12th Annual SuperConference at the Radisson Blu Aqua Hotel in Chicago on April 23-24, 2012. We'll demonstrate our complete Contract Lifecycle Management Solution including the latest release (V6.0) of Exari Document Assembly Software. We still have a couple of complimentary passes to the show available for qualified in house counsel. Contact Us if you are interested.

We will also exhibit at The 9th Annual IACCM EMEA Forum in London on April 25-26, 2012. The Forum, entitled: Mastering Change - Complex Projects and the Role of Contracts will take place at the Millennium Gloucester Hotel. Our partner Devant, who offer Contractual and Commercial Management Services will be exhibiting with us. We will again demonstrate our complete Contract Lifecycle Management Solution including the latest release (V6.0) of Exari Document Assembly Software. If you would like to attend the forum, please contact us for an admission discount code.

Geoff Maskell, Exari's Vice-President of Sales, Europe and Tiffany Kemp, Devant’s Managing Director, will be presenting a pre-conference workshop entitled, "Managing the Spectrum of Complexity: How simple things can make a big difference in complex commercial management." The workshop will be presented on Workshop Day, Tuesday, April 24 from 11am – 1pm (GMT).

If you aren't attending either of these events and would like to see a demonstration of our Document Assembly and Contract Management solutions, you can register for our next webinar here.

What is CLM (Contract Lifecycle Management)?

2012-03-01T11:04:00.006-05:00

CLM or Contract Lifecycle Management refers to the entire process of creating, negotiating, managing and analyzing your contracts. The term applies whether or not your contracts process is automated. There is complete CLM software, like Exari, and there are standalone software systems that automate one or more steps.

There are eight key steps in the Contract Lifecycle Management process :

Capture: Step #1 for most people is to get all of their existing paper contracts in a central visible place.
Track: Once you know where all your contracts are, the next step is to track any important data so you don’t miss any milestone.
Author: With tracking in place, the focus can shift to accelerating the new contract creation process. The “authoring” process is about setting up contract templates and clause libraries.
Create: Contract creation has two tracks: one for self-service documents for business users and another to help the legal department draft complex contracts.
Approve: Companies need an approval workflow process to ensure that risky contracts are reviewed and approved by the right person.
Negotiate: The typical negotiator needs a toolkit that includes a checklist of issues for each type of deal.
Sign: When the contract is final and agreed it needs to be signed by all relevant people, and the signed copies need to be stored.
Analyze: Enterprises with 100+ contracts need to analyze those contracts for potential risks, rights & obligations.

Click here for more detail on the 8 steps of CLM. To see Contract Lifecycle Management software in action, click here to request a demo of Exari.

Document Assembly Step One – Understanding Your Documents

2012-02-16T09:09:00.002-05:00

The first step in choosing a document assembly system is to understand the various types of documents that you need to automate. Once you understand your documents, you can match the system to your needs. Essentially there are 3 categories of documents.

1) Standard Form Documents

Standard form documents, also known as batch documents, are high-volume documents that are easily automated. Examples of standard form documents include phone bills, mass-marketing letters and standard insurance policies.

Field values (i.e. name and address) may change, but the content remains largely standardized. Since no negotiation is required, the final output is usually print or PDF. Many low-end document assembly or mail merge solutions are able to create this type of document.

2) Semi-Standard Documents

The real challenge in document assembly is when you are automating semi-standard documents. These documents tend to be B2B, complex and require negotiation. Document assembly systems which ask a fixed set of questions in an absolute order are inadequate for automating these documents. As a result, many companies rely on expensive, manual drafting by legal experts.

Although there is negotiation involved with these documents, there are inherent patterns, which can be deciphered with some study. By using a powerful document assembly solution (like Exari) with an "inferencing engine," you can have the machine do the tedious work of figuring out which questions to ask, in what order, and with what dependencies. The more complex the document and its rules, the more important this capability becomes. You still have control over the layout and look of the interview, but you don't waste hours testing and debugging every new template.

3) Bespoke Documents

Bespoke or handcrafted documents are extremely complex and have no predictable negotiation patterns. No document assembly solution can fully automate these documents since their creation requires the skills of a legal expert. But an enterprise-grade document assembly system can produce an excellent first draft, providing a base for the legal department to begin fine-tuning. Once the lawyer has a good first draft, they can export the document to Word for further refining or to send to a counter-party for comment.

If you would like to see enterprise document assembly at work, you can demo Exari here. If you would like a custom demonstration, you can request a demo here.

Taking Some Time Out to Help Others

2012-01-31T07:22:00.002-05:00

Usually we use this blog to bring you the latest information about document assembly and contract management. But today we would like to share with you a recent experience shared by our team. We feel that it's important for us as a company to build a corporate culture of innovation and to give back to our community.

As Exari continues to grow and add customers and employees around the world, we make a point of bringing members of our team to the Boston Headquarters at least once a year. Last week we held our Annual Sales Kickoff 2012. The entire sales team from offices in Europe, Australia and the US gathered in Boston.

In addition to all of the corporate events and innovation sessions - aimed at further enhancing Exari’s industry leading document and contract automation solutions – the entire team spent a half - day volunteering at the Boston food pantry. Run by the Red Cross, the pantry provides a 3-day emergency supply of food to approximately 4,500 low-income families every month, making it the largest emergency food pantry in the city of Boston.

Everyone, including the president, management team and members of the sales and delivery organizations participated in this event together. Some formed an assembly line bagging fruit, milk, vegetables and chicken, while others assisted families in packing these bagged supplies into their vehicles. By the end of the day, working together, the team had packed and distributed more than 600 bags of supplies!

The event was meaningful to all of us and helped foster an employee community and culture reflective of our core ideals.