Quality Contract Templates

The Internet is awash in legal document templates. Sites like LegalZoom, Rocket Lawyer, eForms, and LawDepot offer consumers accessible, affordable documents built from a short online interview.

Tools like Westlaw’s Practical Law and Lexis Smart Forms serve lawyers with high-quality templates and detailed drafting notes; you can answer a detailed list of questions and they kick out a Word document, sometimes with detailed annotations interspersed.

A common characteristic of online legal document templates is the one-way interview to output pipeline. A template is created by a subject matter expert, usually within a proprietary framework, and then published to template users who complete the interview and then generate a document in Microsoft Word or PDF format.

Once the interview is completed a static document is generated. Any subsequent changes are simply hand edits of a plain document.

This model has a number of weaknesses:

• You can’t answer some of the questions while leaving others for later.
• You can’t change answers once you’ve generated the document.
• You can’t modify the template to always reflect your preferred answers or language.

AllDrafts has a growing library of lawyer-created contract templates. When you choose one you can fill in some or all of the fields in either an interview-style form or directly inside the document.

It’s no problem to leave a field empty to answer later.

Every field retains its field properties even after you answer the question. You can come back and change an answer at any time, and any calculated values or conditional clauses will update automatically.

(Or you can choose to convert the field to plain text to prevent field-based changes.)

Because AllDrafts is the word processor it doesn’t need to choose a moment to convert the smart template into a static document for downloading. Documents ‘stay smart’ throughout the editing process.

Even the instruction paragraphs are smart; they are always displayed in a colored frame to distinguish them from the contract text, and you can toggle them on or off in a single click. (Instructions are stored separately from the document; you will see them inline but they are never included in PDF or Word downloads or shown to clients or counter parties unless you specifically request it.) There’s no need to manually delete paragraphs of explanatory text; just turn them off. If you want to consult them again they are just a click away.

And if, as is usually the case, the contract template is 95% what you want, you can easily make your own version of the template.

Any document made from a template retains the template smarts until you remove them. And any document in AllDrafts — including one you just made from a template — can be turned into a template by changing it from ‘Draft’ to ‘Template’ next to the document name. It couldn’t be easier.

And if you’ve got an existing document you want to reuse, you can turn it into a template in AllDrafts by converting facts and personal information into fields, one at a time or all at once with the ‘Redact PII’ option on the Tools menu.

If you’re a legal professional looking for an affordable alternative to Practical Law or Smart Forms, AllDrafts is a great place to start.