The Problem and the Solution

Everyday litigation documents that are not Judicial Council forms - think complaints, declarations, letters, full-blown memos - are difficult, stressful, and very time-consuming to produce. But they’re automatable to a degree that most aren’t aware of. We think the number is 80% across the spectrum of litigation documents. That number can drop to as low as 1/3 for documents like appellate briefs on a case of first impression, for instance, to 100% (literally click print when done selecting the applicable scenario) for documents with limited variance like depo notices.

The marketplace has lots of document automation firms, but virtually all of those firms do only one of two things: (1) generate only basic forms like Judicial Council forms, or basic elements of custom-drafted documents, or (2) offer to let you automate your own documents. But no one gives you the out-of-the-box ability to automatically generate the procedural and substantive components of non-form documents like pleadings, discovery, correspondence, and other what-we-call “free-form” or “attorney-drafted” documents. And we’re not just talking putting some filler or placeholder content on a page. We’re talking about choosing among the most common (say, the top 20) legal/factual scenarios you happen to be in, and having optimized, code-compliant procedural elements (first-page caption including auto-generated document titles and footers, hearing info, original filing/trial dates, signature blocks, and other foundational content) and having your documents populate like magic with incisive, shepardized, and on-point substantive legal argument tailored to the facts and law before you.

In short, the difference between using our platform and not is whether you want to spend your time and energy manually typing out or copying/pasting in sentence after sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, or do something else (please, anything else!) with your precious time.

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Well, OK – but this all sounds a bit too infomercial-ly to me. I have some questions.

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Question: If this really is a big deal, then why haven’t other people done it already?

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Answer: They have. But they are either (1) sold exclusively to billion-dollar law firms which insist upon keeping these tools to themselves because they think these innovations are part of their “competitive advantage,” or (2) they are developed by the in-house tech departments at those firms.

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Question: Yeah, but still, I would think someone would want to get rich by making the software and offering it to smaller firms…

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Answer: We thought so too, which is why we were baffled by the absence of these tools on the marketplace.‡ Our best guess is that it takes a fairly rare combination of real-life litigation knowledge and experience and the ability to develop software. It requires months of intense consideration and hundreds of iterations to generate articulate, persuasive legal content that is well-grounded in law, and to wrap it in a user-friendly interface that is intuitive to a wide range of real litigators, many of whom are not techies. And even then, someone has to want to specifically target civil litigation and civil discovery (shiver) as the subject matter that they’d like to immerse themselves in to make their living. Anyway, that’s our guess as to why this innovation hasn’t yet proliferated in the small-to-medium firm space. It’s not for the lack of us asking the market for it.

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‡If they had been available, we would have bought and used them, and would have gone right on litigating instead of struggling for years trying to learn complicated computer code and navigating perilous tech start-up difficulties. We learned how to automate litigation tasks because we hated the mechanics and mind-numbing aspects of generating document after document. We hated it so much (we’re a little sensitive) that we were probably only 15 or 16 copy-paste/what’s-that-case/how-do-you-spell-the-judge’s-name/get-it-from-that-one-case-where-we-filed-that-one-motion/reformat/Reformat/REFORMAT away from walking away from law practice altogether. But we couldn’t find anyone to give our money to relieve our intolerable frustration. That’s how we became software developers. We’re entirely self-taught out of necessity – we had to fix our own problems. (It’s still strange to us when we call ourselves “developers.”)

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Question: What about HotDocs or LawYaw?

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Answer: They both are of the “we give you the tools to do it yourself” variety, or they'll charge you a significant sum to create document templates for you, templates you can't alter or create anew unless you continue to pay them, or else invest the time to learn their program. I used to wish it weren’t so.

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Bottom Line

We think litigation and really, life, is hard enough. Some hardships we can’t do much about. Others, we can. We think we’ve found something we can make better, and we hope to improve the lives of, and ultimately, the outcomes for litigators across the state.

About Us

We are civil litigators who ran small firms who made tools to solve or automate away the things that frustrated us the most about litigation. Over time, making those tools and the thrill of pushing the technological envelope became more fulfilling than our day jobs. So we decided it was time to offer our platform to the public and to dedicate the majority of our time and effort (we still litigate) to building useful tools to make it easier for in-the-trenches litigators to be the most effective advocates for their clients.

Right now, our founder is riffing with gag, EasyPleader-labeled medicine bottles at Clio Con because, while the main talking point of document automation may be that it saves time, on a personal level, it relieves painful aspects of the job. It liberates hardworking legal professionals from the frustration, hassle, and needless mechanical difficulty of drafting adversarial litigation documents. For us, it really was mentally painful to crank out meet-and-confer letters, separate statements, declarations, exhibits, cover pages, tables of contents…and on and on and on. Maybe it is for you too. If so, you are who we make software for.

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We are EasyPleader, we make tools that make litigation easier, and we can't wait to show you what we've done...