I’m exploring Coda as a solution for my law practice.
I need to assemble legal documents from templates, selecting standard template variations based on answers to interview questions.
For example, if the user answers that jurisdiction should be in California, the tool assembles the document using the damages provision for California (but the Texas damages provision if the user had elected jurisdiction in Texas).
In terms of scale, I want to create a set of 35 template documents for each client, with 1 interview doc per client for the user. When the user answers the interview questions, the tool assembles the 35 docs for the client based on the user’s answers to the interview questions. The interview will be anywhere from 1-300 questions, with anywhere from 1 to 3,000 variable provisions across the 35 docs.
Other tools used in law practice are Contracts Express, Axdraft, HotDocs, DocAssemble etc.
Hey @Augie_Rakow the answer to this greatly depends on what you’re looking for the output to be. I’ve used Coda to automate document creation and it can work great. However, depending on the complexity and how ‘tight’ you want the formatting to be, and how crazy you want to get with your switchIf() statements, your answer will vary.
I believe if you pair format() and switchIf() with some clever table / variable / canvas strategies you can do a lot. You’ve described a rather ambitious project, so I’m a little leary.
I know I’ve seen several discussions in the community here about this concept, so you might find some success stories there as well. I’ve also created a format() template to give you some ideas:
Thank you thank you. This explanation and template look like just what I need in order to evaluate Coda for my use case. I’m new to Coda and am evaluating a few tools so it will take a bit to explore the template, so just wanted to shoot you a thank you up top.
Hey @Augie_Rakow! I know this post is a few years old but if you’re still looking for something like this, my company just released a Pack called Export to Word Pro that does just this. It takes a in template Word doc, then automatically fills it in with data from your Coda doc. We built it after a lawyer reached out to us requesting something like Contract Express.