Error Proofing Your Documents

If you been reading my blog for very long you might have noticed that I’m passionate about having documents that are free of errors. The question that you may be asking is, “How do I get my documents so that they are ‘error proof?’”

The answer lies in your ability to create systems in your office that ensure 100% accuracy and don’t rely on human intervention to do this.

So how to you create a process that ensures accuracy?

The first step is to do a full review of the document templates that you send to your clients. Go through and review them to ensure that the right language is there and that the template itself is error proof.

The next step is to ensure that you have your document templates automated. With automation you are able to take 80 to 90 percent of the errors out of the document creation process because the templates are error proof to begin with.  If you happen to be a firm that is still using find and replace you are going to have an extremely hard time getting to the 80% to 90% error free capability.

Next develop a set of decision trees that your attorneys use every time that they create a document.  This is a set of questions that the attorney can fill out and pass to the person doing the document preparation. This ensures that the right selections make it into the document in the first place.

Next develop a set of standards that are used when preparing the documents. Think of it as a checklist.  With this checklist in place and followed every time you will be well on your way to developing an error proof system.

The last step is to track your errors so that you know when they are happening. This is so you can continue to improve your processes to ensure that your documents are error free.