Newsletter Archives | TheFormTool

Intelligent Systems Don’t Outsource Judgment

The Team at TheFormTool — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 00:04:22 +0000

Intelligent Systems Don’t Outsource Judgment

There is a growing temptation in modern practice to confuse assistance with substitution.

Technology now drafts, predicts, suggests, reformulates, summarizes. It is fast. It is impressive. It is increasingly persuasive.

But none of it exercises judgment.

Judgment is slower.  It is contextual.  It is accountable.

And it belongs to the lawyer.

Most of our customers would never consider outsourcing their legal thinking. They would not delegate strategy to a machine. They would not ask an algorithm to decide what a client’s interests require.

So why should their documents behave as though judgment were optional?

Intelligent technology can not replace the professional. It reinforces the professional.

It provides structure without assumption.  Control without intrusion.  Precision without improvisation.

It follows rules rather than probabilities. It behaves predictably rather than persuasively. It executes instructions rather than generating suggestions.

There is nothing dramatic about this approach. It does not advertise itself as revolutionary. It does not promise to think for you.

It simply stays in its lane.

And that is precisely the point.

A disciplined practice does not outsource its reasoning. It does not delegate its custody. It does not confuse convenience with responsibility.

Technology should strengthen the lawyer’s role, not dilute it.

An intelligent system knows the difference.

The post Intelligent Systems Don’t Outsource Judgment appeared first on TheFormTool.

The Human Advantage: Why AI Will Always Need a Supervisor

The Team at TheFormTool — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 19:59:14 +0000

The Human Advantage

Why AI Still Needs Will Always Need a Supervisor

Artificial Intelligence is fast becoming a fixture in legal drafting—from contract clauses to court filings. But as the tools evolve, a hard truth remains:

AI doesn’t know what it’s saying.

And it certainly doesn’t know what it means.

Which is why lawyers—real lawyers—must stay firmly in the loop

When AI Fails Loudly

We’ve all seen the headlines: AI-generated court briefs citing non-existent cases; legal assistants drafting with tools that “hallucinate” clauses or invent facts.

Fortunately, litigators discover these errors quickly. Filings are public. Opposing counsel reads them. Judges push back. There’s a built-in correction mechanism—even if it’s embarrassing.

But what about the legal work that’s invisible until it’s too late?

- Wills and trusts that sit in a drawer for a decade
- Health care directives that emerge only in crisis
- Commercial contracts with buried errors
- Real estate documents with quietly missing protections

When AI creates those, and no one checks the work?

That’s not a correction mechanism — it’s a time bomb.

HITL Isn’t Good Enough

In tech circles, the phrase “Human in the Loop” (HITL) is offered as a safety valve: a person, somewhere, monitors the machine.

But in legal practice, not just any human will do.

And passive oversight isn’t enough.

Confidentiality. Judgment. Responsibility. These aren’t tasks that can be outsourced to an untrained user or anonymous reviewer.

The law demands more than HITL.

It requires something better:

Introducing LITL – Lawyer in the Loop

Lawyer in the Loop (LITL) is a professional standard for the ethical use of AI in legal work.

It means no AI-generated content enters the legal record—or reaches the client—without being directly reviewed, supervised, and signed off by a licensed attorney.

It’s not an obstacle to progress. It’s the only path forward that protects:

- Attorney-client privilege
- Ethical accountability
- Human judgment
- Legal integrity

Why This Matters Now

Some in the legal tech world are quietly promoting HITL as the way forward: hire non-lawyers to review AI output, let junior staff handle the oversight, or worst of all—let clients verify their own documents.

That’s not scalable.
It’s not ethical.
And it’s not professional.

Clients rely on lawyers to apply training, experience, and judgment. If we’re not in the loop—really in the loop—we’ve outsourced more than work.
We’ve outsourced responsibility.

LITL Sets the Standard

LITL ensures that:

- A real lawyer makes the call
- The client’s data stays protected
- Privilege and ethics are preserved
- Errors are caught before they explode

It’s a standard for professionals.
A defense against carelessness.
And a stake in the ground for legal ethics in the AI era.

No LITL, No Trust.

We don’t let AI argue in court.
We shouldn’t let it sign off on a will, either.

If you’re a legal professional using—or thinking about using—AI for drafting, document automation, or legal intake:

- Stay in the loop.
- Be the loop.

LITL is how we build trust in the tools we choose to use.

Formal Definition for LITL:

Lawyer in the Loop (LITL) is a professional standard for the responsible use of AI in legal work. It requires that a licensed attorney—not a machine, not a paralegal, not a non-lawyer reviewer—directly supervises, reviews, and accepts responsibility for any AI-generated or AI-assisted legal output before it is relied upon or delivered to a client.

To review the white papers we’ve published on this subject, please click here.

The post The Human Advantage: Why AI Will Always Need a Supervisor appeared first on TheFormTool.

Contract Automation for Dealmakers: From LOI to Closing Docs

The Team at TheFormTool — Tue, 08 Apr 2025 19:33:57 +0000

Contract Automation for Dealmakers: From LOI to Closing Docs

For dealmakers, time is always of the essence. Whether you’re orchestrating a merger, negotiating an acquisition, or shepherding a joint venture through due diligence, every document—from the first Letter of Intent (LOI) to the final closing packet—demands precision, consistency, and speed. That’s where contract automation steps in, turning bottlenecks into breakthroughs, as they complete contracts in minutes or hours.

Why Automation Matters

Transaction documents are often repetitive in structure but complex in content. The terms shift slightly from deal to deal, but the bones remain the same. With contract automation, deal teams can generate entire suites of customized, accurate documents in minutes rather than hours or days.

Fewer Errors: Automated logic ensures consistency across all documents, reducing the risk of embarrassing (or costly) mistakes.
Faster Turnarounds: Drafts that once took hours can be assembled in minutes—with variables, clauses, and conditional language dynamically applied.
Improved Collaboration: Internal and external stakeholders can work from the same up-to-date templates, confident that their version is the latest and cleanest.

From LOI to Closing: What Can Be Automated?

Let’s walk through a standard deal cycle and highlight the automation opportunities:

Letter of Intent (LOI): Party names, deal terms, exclusivity provisions, and timelines can be structured with variable-driven fields to allow instant generation and fast updates.
Due Diligence Requests: Automating request lists and checklists speeds up onboarding and reduces gaps in documentation.
Term Sheets and Deal Summaries: Standardizing the structure while customizing key economic and legal terms allows for high-volume, high-confidence drafting.
Purchase Agreements, Operating Agreements, Employment Contracts: Once terms are settled, the definitive documents can be assembled in bulk with minimal manual edits.
Closing Checklists and Ancillary Documents: Automate the production of everything from officer certificates to consents and resolutions—ensuring no document gets missed at the finish line.

The Right Tool for the Job

Many deal teams rely on generic document tools or word processor macros—but these fall short when logic gets layered. What’s needed is a purpose-built solution that can:

Handle complex conditional logic without requiring coding expertise
Work entirely offline for confidentiality and control
Be mastered by professionals—not just programmers

That’s where tools like Doxserá^®, Doxserá^®DB and TheFormTool^® PRO shine. They’re designed specifically for transactional professionals who need bulletproof documents under tight timelines. These tools don’t just fill blanks—they think through documents the way you do.

Deals Don’t Wait—Neither Should You

If your team is still relying on copy/paste and manual markups, it’s time to step into a more efficient future. Contract automation isn’t just a nice-to-have—it’s your next competitive advantage.

Want to see how fast your next deal can go from LOI to done? Click for the case study.

Of course, the Knowledge Based has dozens of articles sharing tips on creating forms.

The post Contract Automation for Dealmakers: From LOI to Closing Docs appeared first on TheFormTool.

Pricing Transparency is Essential for Customers

The Team at TheFormTool — Tue, 08 Apr 2025 18:28:16 +0000

Pricing Transparency is Essential for Customers

Our article on pricing transparency apparently struck a nerve with readers

We were working to verify a new customer’s comments that he recently left HD over a large annual price increase and a three-year contract that called for 12% increases each year. We assigned the research task to our best research AI bot and on March 27 it reported posted prices of $800 for an author version and $99 per month for a user. It referenced the source as https://mitratech.com/resource-hub/blog/how-much-does-hotdocs-cost/ but when we attempted to manually verify that information on March 31, we found only This is awkward, but we can’t find that page!

For ourselves, we can’t get comfortable with firms that don’t disclose pricing up front. On the other hand, we’re proud of our industry-leading pricing and share it. TheFormTool products are designed to work entirely inside Microsoft Word — with no cloud services, no subscriptions required, and full control over your documents and data. See Doxserá.

If the $800 figure is accurate, it’s mind-boggling to pay that much for a program that is difficult to learn and will only produce one document at a time. For simple document automation, TheFormTool PRO provides a one-time purchase option for $89.

With the assistance of customers and OpenAI, we’ve built a webpage comparing Hotdocs with Doxserá. We invite you to take a look.

We’re also recommending Bill Cutchins’ instructions on converting forms and his firm for those who want to outsource. One new customer firm is using it with great success to convert 1,000 of its forms.

For a great primer on converting HD’s forms to Doxserá or DB, see Bill Cutchin’s Converting Templates from HotDocs^© to TheFormTool’s Products.

The post Pricing Transparency is Essential for Customers appeared first on TheFormTool.

Scaling Artificial Intelligence

The Team at TheFormTool — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 20:34:23 +0000

Scaling Artificial Intelligence

A zettabyte is 2⁷⁰ bytes or 1 billion terabytes, which is 1 billion gigabytes

History of Data

Six years ago we commented to a Webinar audience, “2,300 years ago, Macedonian information workers gathered all the knowledge in the world into the great Library of Alexandria. Its 200,000 books were made available to the fewer readers than that in the whole world.” Six years ago Forbes estimated that total world knowledge amounted to about 44 zettabytes, 44 trillion gigabytes of data, a previously unimaginable amount.

In addition to an unimaginable amount of information, it was also nearly useless, with usage rates declining precipitously as gross amounts of data exploded. Bernard Marr estimated that collectively we were using only about .5%, one-half of one percent, of the available data. He added that increasing average usage to merely .55% would dramatically increase individual company profits, productivity and the economy.

Because the growth and growth rate of new information are both increasing exponentially, it’s impossible to estimate current usage, but our somewhat informed guess is that it hasn’t moved appreciably even though total Internet users have increased from about 1 billion 20 years ago to more than 5 billion today. Data growth has been that extreme.

Comparisons Over Time

The numbers are truly staggering. From the Library of Alexandria with its 200,000 volumes holding the complete knowledge of the world to the Library of Congress, with its estimated 200 terabytes of digital and physical data, is both quite a leap and not even a drop in the bucket.

Eric Schmidt posited that from the very beginning of humanity to the year 2003, an estimated 5 exabytes of information was created, about 0.5% of a zettabyte. Today we produce that much in a couple of hours.

Today we have dozens of million-square foot data-centers that can and do move a significant percentage of Forbes’ estimate all by themselves. Artificial Intelligence centers, with far fewer people working than in manufacturing, transportation, retail and services, deliver high economic output through automation and optimization.

The old saying was “Knowledge is power.” The new one is “Data is riches and growth.”

In 1955, U.S. manufacturing employment was 16.6 million, or 32% of the total. There was tremendous popular anxiety that automation would create unemployment at an existential level. Instead total employment has grown from 65 million to 161 million, who enjoy a standard of living almost unimaginable 70 years ago.

We believe the hype on AI as a competitor to knowledge workers is overblown. Its real value is its ability to empower them, and all of us.

At TFT our role is to enable customers to put all that information to good use more efficiently and accurately than through “copy, cut and paste.”

The post Scaling Artificial Intelligence appeared first on TheFormTool.

All Your Math in One Place

The Team at TheFormTool — Tue, 26 Dec 2023 21:32:41 +0000

A huge percentage of our customers also use various levels of math in their Word documents, everything from simple sales tax, to extremely complex risk analytics, financings of all types, appraisals, secondary market debt purchases, and commercial construction quotations to name just a few.

The big takeaway, pun intended, is Excel. With any of our programs, chances are it’s just not needed. Consolidating math computations within your documents can significantly reduce the risk of errors and speed your work.

Our Knowledge Base has scores of How-to articles and videos, including this one, which was a big deal until we introduced a single button to do the job instead.

The Payment function is one of 25 sophisticated Math functions available with just a click, and they can be layered and combined for almost unlimited power.

The post All Your Math in One Place appeared first on TheFormTool.

Our Pro Bono Program and the Oklahoma Guardianship Season

The Team at TheFormTool — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 23:00:08 +0000

Pro Bono and the Guardianship Season

It was 11 years ago that Jim Calloway, then as now Director of the Oklahoma Bar Association’s Management Assistance Program and Senior Guru of all things legal management, suggested that the soon-to-be formed TheFormTool, LLC seemed to be ideally structured to actively support consumer-oriented pro bono legal services firms.

It’s taken a while to prove Jim’s theory valid, but the past year has done exactly that.

After reading our earlier case study, Consumer Credit &Business Formation, Jim reached out in June to explain that Guardianship Season in Oklahoma describes July and August, the pre-school months where hundreds of children face desperate needs for legal guardians to qualify for medical exams and entry to school.

As Jim explained that the demand for legal support for guardianship petitions and other documents overwhelms volunteers, we were all ears. Oklahoma Access to Justice Foundation and its affiliate Oklahoma County Guardianship Clinic handle a huge workload in Guardianship needs for those unable to afford representation by private firms.

As a result of Jim’s suggestion, we were delighted to expand our pro bono support program by delivering 36 customized guardianship forms for both minor and adult needs to the OK A2J Foundation along with 16 Doxserá licenses for its volunteers. There is no cost to the Foundation.

At TFT we estimate that this combination will more than triple OK A2J’s immediate capacity for petitioning for guardianships and that it will provide a pathway to increasing capacity even more in the near future. All thanks to Jim’s foresight yesteryear and reaching out when he saw the need.

The post Our Pro Bono Program and the Oklahoma Guardianship Season appeared first on TheFormTool.

A New, High-tech Tool for Treating Issues

The Team at TheFormTool — Thu, 11 May 2023 18:05:24 +0000

To make our Diagnostic Portal even more useful and easier to use, we’ve added an interactive map to the Portal’s home page.

The map is a logical graphic with paths that describe symptoms and clickable hotspots that allow a user to click to the appropriate solution.

For those who prefer a graphical user interface, the map will reduce the time to the first diagnostic step from as much as two minutes to less than 30 seconds.

Not all of our customers ever have a need to visit the Diagnostic Portal, but it’s worth a tour just for the fun of it.

The post A New, High-tech Tool for Treating Issues appeared first on TheFormTool.

How to Escape the Handcuffs of Hourly Billing

The Team at TheFormTool — Fri, 17 Feb 2023 21:19:28 +0000

Whatever the perspective,
whether as a professional, a consumer, an economist,
there is insufficient value to continue the practice of hourly billing

The reasons to avoid it are legion and persuasive, but for this audience the most telling argument is that working for an hourly wage prevents the accumulation of wealth while it encourages an excessive investment of the most valuable resource, time.

The pivot point for evaluating hourly billing is that by definition it forces on the professional and the consumer diametrically opposing goals; one wants to maximize; the other, minimize. That is an obstruction that prevents trust, a real hurdle when building any business because it focuses the consumer’s attention on the need to trust the professional on both competence and cost simultaneously. Worse, it supports an impression that the professional lacks confidence.

Instead, there should be a single, overarching common goal between the parties: complete the task at hand at the agreed-upon price.

If the task is especially complex, where the risks of uncertainty cannot be contained, then divide and conquer— design and price the initial task so its goal is to determine the follow-on services required, while providing a range of estimates for the follow-on work. In other words, piecemeal the pricing based on definable steps.

If you needed a medical specialist, an intervening cardiologist or a neurosurgeon, the hourly rate would be not only irrelevant, but also actually detrimental to your decision making. You’d want the task accomplished and the overall price affordable. Period.

Our recent publication, Case Study: Foreclosure, tells how one lawyer and his firm moved from charging for its labor to charging for the job. The result was happier clients and a five-times increase in effective income.

The post How to Escape the Handcuffs of Hourly Billing appeared first on TheFormTool.

Set ‘Em Up, Barkeep!

The Team at TheFormTool — Thu, 01 Dec 2022 23:17:40 +0000

To celebrate the sons of one of our team members leading their team to a 2nd Place finish at the 2022 State Cross Country Championships we were tempted to yell, “Set ‘em up for all, barkeep!” for the thousands of adult attendees. However, more conservative thinkers suggested a more constructive approach: We should share the boys’ success and our celebration with TheFormTool’s customers instead.

We’re absolutely delighted to do that.

Effective immediately through December, please enjoy a 10% discount on any purchases or renewals of any of our products by using the discount code, “L&RCelebrate!” followed by the retail price of the software you’re buying. For Doxserá DB, for example, this would be “L&RCelebrate!279“.

Any purchase, whether a single license or hundreds, will qualify.

Moving your renewal into December will accelerate your tax savings by as much as a year. Those concerned about inflation—we all should be!—can beat it by renewing for one or more years now at current pricing.

Welcome to our celebration!

The post Set ‘Em Up, Barkeep! appeared first on TheFormTool.