Legacy Systems - That Means Old, Unsupported or Underpowered
Document assembly systems have been around for a LONG TIME. Some say, going back to the ancient Sumerians working with Cunneform tablets. A carver would prepare form tablets, leaving a few blanks to add names and amounts, and sell them to itinerant business man. In medieval times to the present, Hebrew calligraphers would prepare elaborately scripted marital contracts (called Ketubah's) and leave blanks for the names of the bride and groom, data of marriage, and witnesses.
More recently, with computers came the invention of "templates" and "stopcodes" to allow a user to pick up a form, and fill in the blanks. When I was a young college student (ages ago), I connected via time-sharing to a Honeywell mainframe at Dartmouth College, to answer questions which would draft a "letter to Mom". It was quicker than handwritting, and it including optional request for money (ostensibly for food).
So document assembly is not a new concept. Over the past two decades a number of very creative software engineers have written and marketed powerful document assembly engines. A number have been successful in getting converts to invest in their software and build document automation systems. A lot of great stuff has been done. However, as time has passed, the developers of these platforms have abandonned them, either forcing their users to "upgrade" to new software or just simply closing their doors for lack of funds.
These OLD or LEGACY systems worked (and continue to work). But there are often few people around with knowledge to support them, or give them ongoing refresh required to maintain a document assembly system to adapt to the ever changing legal and business environment. It is for this reason, the Basha Systems has invested time in understanding these legacy software system, and provided an alternative. We do not seek to maintain users on these system. Rather, we work with them to extract the legal and textual content, business logic and know-how and migrate them to modern, well-capitalized software platforms like HotDocs, DealBuilder and others.
If you have invested time in any of the automation systems below, we encourage you to explore these pages, and get a feel of what we might be able to do for you. Some of the systems are just "history". Others are still viable, but leave many reasons to changes.
Legacy Automation Systems
There are a number of systems out there that just don't cut it. These are systems that people use every day and work. The vendors of these systems either don't support them anymore, as is the case for CAPS Author, HotDocs 4.2 and ThinkDOCS, or they are out of business, as in the case of PowerTXT. The systems are described below. Please click on the links to the left (or below) for more details about the benefits of converting these systems to HotDocs or DealBuilder.
We love CAPSAuthor, the grand-dad of document assembly. CAPSAuthor and WinCAPS systems once ruled the day. They were the tool to beat in the DOS days, before my time. The systems were fast and object oriented. That meant, you could reuse objects. The scripting tools for dialogs were as powerful, if not more powerful than the text manipulation tools of the assembly engine. However, it is over a DECADE since Capsoft, later Matthew Bender, and now LexisNexis ceased supporting this software. Even the WinCAPS assembly engine only handed the enduser assembly. We have evaluated and rebuilt numerous CAPSAuthor and WinCAPS systems built by Capsoft, West Publishing and others. We know how to read these systems, and rebuild them. For more information, click here.
At one time, HotDocs was overshadowed by its parent, CAPSAuthor. It lacked a powerful scripting engine. It's dialog builder was limited and sequential. There was no support for reusable objects required for powerful object-oriented programming. Don't get me wrong, it was far superior to and easier to use than PerfectScript and WordBasic, but it was lacking. There exist thousands of systems that were built with HotDocs 4.2 and HotDocs 5.x. LexisNexis, the current owner of HotDocs ceased support for those products long ago. In fact, there is no support for HotDocs 6, and HotDocs 2005 support is being or has been phased out. It is time to upgrade. And not just to pay more money. There are hundreds of new features that are now critical for a smooth-functioning and easy-to-maintain system. If your are interested in upgrading, or merely considering, read on. For more information, click here.
Intercon, the developers of PowerTXT had a great idea. What would happen if you parsed a legal contract into headings and body text, and then used a tool to selectively choose by heading, which language to include in an assembled contract. What if you could automate the parsing process, allow the user to supply alternate clauses, and even include some field logic. The result was PowerTXT. In its time, it was the most innovative redesign of documents out there. PowerTXT has long since shut its doors, and moved on. However, the parsing and outline concept has been resurrected in Online solutions such as iXio's qSHIFT, Exari, and Microsystems D3. The PowerTXT system, for all its innovation, lacked support for complex scripting, repeats and collections and a host of other features. If you do have a system built in PowerTXT, Basha Systems can help. For more information, click here.
About five years agos, ThinkDOCS took the legal community by storm with an innovative idea. What if your could assemble a document and have your answers stored in a database. The assembled documents would retain a "link" to the database such that even after the user edited the document, it could be REFRESHED so that the fields in the database were relinked to the document, that you could even rerunthe assembly and get your data into the now modified document. It was a GREAT IDEA. However, ThinkDOCS is no longer marketing the product. There were some fundamental limitations to the tool that were not clearly explained and that ultimately limited the expansionof theproduct. If you do have a system build in ThinkDOC, Basha Systems can help. For more information, click here.
Under-Powered Document Automation Systems
There are a number of systems out there that are just too hard to use, or lack sufficient power to achieve the best results with automation
At Basha Systems, we know all about Word macros and WordPerfect macros. We use them every day to do a range of things to our documents. However, the one thing we don't do, is use them for document assembly. They are both difficult and inherently limited. For more information about why such tools are just NOT CUT OUT for document assembly and what Basha Systems can do for you, click here.
Many people mistake merge templates for document assembly. Merge templates are just documents with holes. They are tools that will save some typing type, but provide only limited productivity gains. We use merge templates for mass mailings, for customized broadcase faxes, for envellopes and labels. But we do NOT use merge templates for document automation. If you have invested time in building merge template systems, but have hit the wall on what you can do, contact us. We can help. For more information, click here.
For many people, document assembly is a matter of picking the right clause. Give me a picklists of clauses; let me review and choose the one that is closest to my needs, and then let me edit it. This is a form of automation, but it is not document assembly. True document assembly includes both clause picking and data population. True document assembly recognizes the inter-relation between clauses in a document, that choosing one clause, means that references elsewhere in the document need to be adjusted. If you are curious about clause-based document assembly, or have invested in such a solution and now need MORE POWER, contact us. For more information, click here.
Systems that Long Ago Hit the Dust Heap
These old document assembly systems were greatin their day, but no longer. You may wish to shed a tear for them. But if you are still using them, please call us. You will need some help
IBM Displaywriter
IBM had a mainframe wordprocessor called Displaywriter. Believe it or not, there are still clients who use this program in terminal emulation mode. Displaywriter (or DW3, DW4 etc) had a sophisticated programming language. It did "text forms" on a line-by-line screen, but it could handle a whole variety of commands. One of our clients only recently left such a system. We worked with the Nassau County District Attorney, first to map out the logic of the old system and then extract the content. To give an idea of the pricing of such work. IBM was charging $5,000 a month to maintain a programmer in their office who could answer support calls, and suggested $25,000 just to come up with a proposal for converting the system. We did the complete project for less than the cost of the evaluation and a month or two of support.
SmartWords and Xyrite
Users loved Xyrite. Publishers loved it. Xyrite, rebranded SmartWords had a reveal codes "to die for". It supported 3 view modes, Codes-view, draft, and print preview. The program was then reengineered into integrated development environment with a BTRieve database and full document assembly engine that allowed the user to build systems for the desktop and the web --- and that was ten (10) years ago, before HotDocs Server was even a flicker on the imagination.
Unfortuneately, the company went out of business several years ago. Its user base was limited to a few hundred law firms that purchased an estate planning form set called Wealth Transfer Planning. The authors of that form set, Jonathan Blattmachr and Michael Graham formed a new company, Interactive Legal Systems, and purchased the right to the forms. Basha Systems was retained by ILS to rebuild the system from scratch using HotDocs and Microsoft Word. You can see the results of this process elsewhere on our site.
