LONDON, UK – While the adoption of document automation software has made rapid progress in the legal sector, the limited functionality associated with many solutions has often meant valuable data and information contained within documents has been difficult to access and re-use – a cause of frustration for many lawyers.

The latest release of Contract Express is raising the bar when it comes to functionality, introducing a number of new features that advance the way law firms provide innovative self-service documents to their clients. Through the creation of new capabilities, such as Datasheets, the solution increases the visibility and usefulness of data held in documents, helping to drive greater usability of existing documents and ultimately enabling law firms to expand their offering to the market.

“Advanced software solutions such as Contract Express play an integral role in today’s rapidly evolving legal ecosystem which has placed increasing pressure on law firms to offer innovative and cost-efficient services,” said Lucinda Case, vice president of Strategy at the Legal UK&I business of Thomson Reuters. “The latest release of Contract Express further enhances the way law firms service their clients by enabling lawyers to interact with clients in a multitude of new ways, while also delivering significant cost savings.”

Created in direct response to law firm demand, the three key new features in Contract Express 6.0 include: Datasheets, Matters and Document Versioning.

The Datasheets feature enables users to create dynamic views of the transactional information contained in documents created by Contract Express. This advanced feature allows law firms and their clients to gain greater insight into their automated documents, surfacing valuable information such as key dates, non-standard clauses, deal values and more.

Documents created by Contract Express 6.0 are now fully versioned, meaning users can upload and share manually edited documents with internal users and clients. Further, the Document Versioning feature gives lawyers greater control over the life of a document, enabling them to gain visibility into those documents that have deviated from the standard Contract Express template.

The new Matters feature in Contract Express 6.0 makes it possible to group one or more document templates around a specific legal matter. Its new Workflow Steps feature allows template authors to suggest the next template within a matter and ensuring necessary steps are followed. In addition, documents in a matter can share data across multiple templates. 

Contract Express 6.0 also introduces a new code completion capability in Contract Express Author. This powerful feature will speed-up the creation of templates and improves the quality of resulting documents.

“We often hear from our customers that Contract Express Author is the gold standard when it comes to automating templates. We wanted to make this process even easier for lawyers by creating a predictive as-you-type tool that suggests what to include when creating rules,” says Andy Wishart, Global Head of Contract Express at Thomson Reuters.

Contract Express Author eliminates the need for creating a separate questionnaire, document, and metadata program. After a lawyer marks up their template, Contract Express processes the Word file and automatically generates the questionnaire to guide lawyers and other users through a document.

Contract Express, with its patented technology, offers law firms and lawyers an easy-to-deploy, simple-to-scale, and intuitive solution, allowing them to quickly embrace modern digital document drafting. It allows lawyers to automate templates right inside Microsoft Word® by using simple mark-up that is akin to marking up a document with a red pen, so it is now possible for a lawyer to automate a document in a fraction of the time it would take in prior-generation solutions.

More than 60 of the world's leading law firms are already using Contract Express to drive document creation efficiency and these forward-looking law firms are charging ahead of the competition. Examples include Cooley GO, WSGR's Term Sheet Generator, and Goodwin Procter's Document Driver.

Thomson Reuters

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