The Contract Certainty Blog | Exari

I’m not sure whether it’s ‘cool’ for us to be promoting the fact, but we’re going to anyway.

Back in May, Australian personal injury law firm Slater & Gordon (ASX:SGH) captured attention as the first law firm to float on a public exchange. Listed at a dollar per share, S&G popped on day 1, up about 40% and since then has risen more than 80% above its listing price (A$1.80+ by the end of August).

There are three scenarios where the document generation business case is particularly strong. If your business fits any of these, you should have a good shot at making things happen. If not, try to find a part of the business that does.

This might well be the quote of the year:

Alternative fees are like teenage sex. There are more people talking about it than doing it. And those that are doing it don't know what they're doing. Jeffrey Carr, general counsel at FMC Technologies

Building an automated document takes three important steps.

Guess what? There's a standards war going on. Not quite as scary as the war on terror. But a war that will decide which format we all use for "office" documents, and how much choice we have over the tools used to write those documents. What a novel idea. Choice in the office tools market. You mean there's something other than Word?

This is all happening because I didn’t write, “I’ll charge you 1.5 percent” – John O’Quinn

What’s the value of a clause? About $35 million if your name is John O’Quinn. His firm failed to include a clause authorizing the deduction of “general expenses” from settlement payouts in a breast implant class action. And this month, an aribtration panel ordered the firm to pay $35.7M in damages to the clients who were overcharged. Expensive mistake.

According to the latest IACCM newsletter, someone at the Faculty of Economics at the University of Groningen has made an amazing discovery: a 'one size fits all' approach to standard contract terms will often lead to sub-optimal results in key strategic relationships. That's what they found when they had a look at high tech alliances and the contracts used to set them up.

One of the favorite excuses for not using a document generation system is that users don't trust it. It's too much of a black box. The system makes you answer a bunch of questions. You wait... The system spits out a document. And that's that.

Exari Version 5 is alive. And boy has technology improved in the 21 years since Short Circuit hit the silver screen…