Re: Software opinions needed (precedents based authoring)

["Bill Hall" <bill -dot- hall -at- hotkey -dot- net -dot- au>]

Stephen McDermott requested information about applications for authoring
contracts based on precedents. Given that my first job for my present
employer was as commercial documentation coordinator for rolling out several
$A BN worth of subcontracts, I have had a long interest in precedents-based
contract authoring systems.

Yes, at the expense of extensive development work with templates and FDK, a
lot of what Stephen asks for could probably be done with FM+SGML in
association with a content management environment. However, Speedlegal
(http://www.speedlegal.com/) has already done the development work in a
stand-alone environment, and provides an integrated content management and
delivery structure as well in the one application - SmartPrecedent. This is
a state-of-the-art precedents based contract authoring and production system
based on an XML structured authoring tool and database. If you do a lot of
precedents based contract authoring, the system should pay for itself in
substantially less than a year. My first task when I return from leave will
be to implement the system in Tenix.

SmartPrecedent stands alone (i.e., includes XML database, XML editor, and
HTML capabilities, but can export RTF and PDF. It also has all the
capabilities for conditional text, variables, and separate files (book
builds) and provides a number of additional knowledge management/use
capabilities (http://www.speedlegal.com/knowledge.html). It is also not
difficult to take up existing documents from RTF. It appears to offer major
savings in any kind of authoring environment based on precedents.

A number of commercial precedents based systems have been developed using MS
Word templates the basis. These all suffer from using a third party tool
(i.e., Word) which is not particularly suited to long and complex documents.
SpeedLegal is the first to purpose build an XML environment to do this in an
intelligent way.

SpeedLegal is one of several Melbourne Australia-based organisations which
have developed world's best practice content management applications. It
should not be too difficult to obtain support for the product in the US
(although little is needed) through their San Francisco office. The
international CCH/Wolters Kluwer organisation is a major investor, so I
think the product will be around for the long haul.

In the first instance, we will be trialing SmartPrecedent for our internally
authored service and non-disclosure agreements. We have also already
demonstrated SmartPrecedent's capability to take up the Australian Defence
Materiel Organisation's Smart 2000 precedent
(http://www.dmo.defence.gov.au/lsd/smart2000/smart2000.cfm). Long term, in
association with the Australian Industry Defence Network (a defence industry
association), CSIRO, RMIT University and SpeedLegal, we are working to
convince the Australian Department of Defence to adopt an XML standard for
all defence contracts. We are also working with the international Legal XML
Organisation (founded in the US) to promote this (http://www.legalxml.org/)
as an international standard. See especially .../contracts and
.../horizontal and .../australia for the relevant work groups. See also
.../archives for work done to this point towards establishing standards.

Long term, we will probably integrate the SpeedLegal environment into our
corporate content management environment based on RMIT's SIM system
(http://www.tenix.com/PDFLibrary/91.pdf; http://www.simdb.com/;
http://www.binarything.com/binarything/openpublish/OpenPublish2001a.pdf;
http://www.aija.org.au/AIJAVSCL/AIJAVSCLtopic8.pdf). However, at the moment
the SpeedLegal system provides an easily implemented stand-alone system
ideally suited to our legal people.


Bill Hall
Documentation Systems Analyst
Strategy and Development Group
Tenix Defence
Yarra Tower, World Trade Centre
Melbourne, Vic. 3005, Australia
mailto:bill -dot- hall -at- tenix -dot- com (on leave until 16/2/2001)
mailto:bill -dot- hall -at- hotkey -dot- net -dot- au



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