Fenwick & West LLP is a leading technology and life sciences law firm with more than 300 attorneys working across offices in Silicon Valley, San Francisco, and Seattle. For over forty years, Fenwick has been representing some of the world’s most innovative companies and has received many awards and honors for their work.
Fenwick has been using HotDocs firm-wide for several years. Before deploying HotDocs, they relied on Microsoft Word for their document generation process—generic versions of documents and agreements were downloaded from a forms library and then manually filled out and edited. Fenwick chose to bring in HotDocs as a way to automate and speed up the document generation process.
When asked why Fenwick chose HotDocs over other platforms, Mark Gerow, Director of Application Development & Business Process, said, “We chose HotDocs because it was accessible to our legal professionals and had good traction across the legal industry. Our corporate attorneys like the standardization, ease of use, and the fact that they can create packages of documents with the data gathered from client interviews. For developers, HotDocs provides a good framework for delivering customized document workflow solutions.”
Attorneys at Fenwick also value the ability to have external-facing HotDocs interviews that clients can fill out directly. When a client fills out an interview, the answers are written back to internal answer files, and then the documents are reviewed by attorneys. Once the documents are generated, they are uploaded to Adobe EchoSign for e-signature by the client, and then stored in Open Text’s document management system. This improved process has allowed the attorneys to provide higher quality services to their clients in a more efficient and timely manner.
According to Gerow, “The attorneys at Fenwick have really jumped in with both feet.” HotDocs has been integrated with their SharePoint environment to provide effective template management and remote access for attorneys. In an average month, over 850 legal documents were generated from 89 different HotDocs interview sessions.
Gerow states, “HotDocs has allowed us to reduce turnaround time for legal document generation, allowing our attorneys to focus their expertise on addressing legal issues unique to each of our clients.”