Dan Terner of Wellington, Florida has very graciously allowed us to reprint his post carried in the ABA SOLOSEZ listserve yesterday.
Has anyone else tried using TheFormTool Pro in conjunction with Clio’s documentation template automation system? I haven’t wanted to spend money on separate documentation automation software (like ProDocs, or Pathagoras, etc) because I’m already paying for Clio and Clio includes document automation. Also, all my client data (which I would use to populate various fields) is kept within Clio. I couldn’t figure out a good way to use a separate more fully-featured automation solution that would have access to that information. Without access to the Clio client information, I figured any third-party solution wouldn’t be very compelling. So I figured I’d just have to wait for Clio document automation to improve (it did, a bit, when the ability to use custom fields as variables was added). Yesterday I came across TheFormTool Pro, though, and it looks like the answer. It’s basically just a plug-in for Microsoft Word. It allows for things like conditional variables, derived answers, gender, verb agreement, pluralization, date calculations, etc. Basically everything I was looking for.
While Clio uses << >> to signify its variables, TheFormTool uses { }. So the two are compatible – I took one of my existing Clio Word templates that has fields for client name and address, etc, and then modified it further using TheFormTool. I then uploaded the modified “supertemplate” to Clio. I then ran a test, creating a document within Clio from that template, downloading the resulting document (which now was populated with my Clio client data but which still had the { } fields from TheFormTool, and then opening it in Word and running TheFormTool on it. Worked fine. This is going to save me hours per case, I think.
* I don’t work for Clio, nor for TheFormTool Pro, nor am I getting any sort of compensation for this post, nor did either of them ask me to post, etc. Just legitimately happy to have found such a perfect solution after a year of looking, and wanted to share because I know there are a lot of Clio users that post here but I’ve never heard anyone mention this synergy before.
Clio is a great service and has only gotten better over the last few years. We’re delighted to see Dan using his imagination to make it even more useful to his needs and look forward to additional reports from Dan or from others with similar experiences.
