Why I changed from HotDocs to Doxserá
1. The pandemic! I made a decision that the two lawyers in our firm would work from home and our legal assistant would work in our office. We would not see clients face-to-face and we would only see each other by video. It was a good call because we have seen our colleagues in other law firms confront clients who refused to wear masks and deal with employees who learned on the job that they were Covid-19 Positive. But that meant that we could no longer use the Hotdocs Developer 11 templates that we stored on a shared network drive. We switched to using Sharepoint as a cloud solution, which came free with our Micorsoft Office subscription. Though Hotdocs templates can be stored on Sharepoint, Hotdocs puts document libraries between the users and the templates. The document libraries that have to be reconfigured each time you add a template to a custom library, and each custom library has to be separately configured for each user. Enter Doxsera. Store your Doxsera templates (which are really Word templates at heart) on Sharepoint, and each member of your firm can access them without being wired to a shared network harddrive on a file server. Just tell Word that you keep some templates on Sharepoint, and you are off and running.
2. Constructing a template for a pleadings is much easier with Doxsera. Get your pleading paper template set up once, and then Save As every time you create another pleading-paper-type template.
3. I thought that conditional fields in Hotdocs were a huge improvement over Word’s conditional fields. Doxsera conditional fields are better than Hotdocs’. First, you can easily tell where they begin and end, even if they are nested. Second, Doxsera makes it very convenient to see what the condition was and to edit it.
4. I find that Doxera’s method of changing pronouns and showing singular verbs and plural verbs is so friendly that I can make my documents read in a more natural fashion with much less effort than in Hotdocs.
5. Doxera makes it a pleasure to populate a dropdown field with a list of choices.
Once I made the switch, I learned a few more things about Doxsera that light me up. I can create a questionnaire that I can email to a client. Client reads that questionnaire the same way that she reads any other Word document. Client fills out the Questionnaire and sends it back to me as an email attachment. I merge her answers into a Medical Power of Attorney, and the client has done all the work.
But wait, there’s more. I take the same web questionnaire in the Aurora version of Doxsera. Then I upload it to the satellite in the cloud (the Aurora Web Data site). The satellite reads the questionnaire and automatically converts it into a pretty web form that is the front end for a database. I get to instruct the satellite to email an invitation to my client, asking her to come fill out this comely web form. The answers are stored in a database. Then Word beams down the answers from the satellite and spits out the same Medical Power of Attorney. But in addition, I can retrieve all of the client’s answers from the mother ship any time I need them. I can do this for any template that I create. If I want to make it “client-facing”, I can. If I want to make it a form that I or other members of my staff fill out, I can do that, too.
Originally poster in Customer Reviews on Nov 20, 2020
To learn how to make the change, https://kb.theformtool.com/en_US/115001194223-Deep-Dives-on-Specific-Features/convert-hd-to-tft
