Errors in Legal Documents

The Cost of Errors in Legal Documents

Mistakes and errors in the legal documents you produce can wreak havoc on your firm’s reputation and your relationships with your clients. Terms of art in the legal word are often specific and require precise usage; a missed punctuation mark or incorrectly stated sentence can have drastic effects on your cases.

Knackly has a solution for you. We eliminate errors in your legal documents, reducing your costs and helping you maintain your firm’s reputation for producing clear and correct documents.

What Errors Cost You:

While the costs of error-riddled documents are many, we’ve listed below the ones that have the greatest impact on you and your firm:

• Peace of Mind
  • Mistakes eat at your mental well-being. The errors in legal documents you find cause worry and stress on their own, but they also create a well of doubt and uncertainty. Catching one error brings up the possibility of others lurking in the document, ones you haven’t caught yet. Even after several reviews, you probably still worry about any mistakes you missed.
• Malpractice Liability
  • If the error is large enough, mistakes in your documents could lead to a malpractice suit. Missed provisions and mistakes in substantive terms could not only cost your clients their case but could result in them turning around and placing the blame on your faulty documents. Malpractice suits are lengthy, costly, and damaging to your reputation.
• Reputation
  • As an attorney, you’re well aware that the one of the most important aspects of your career is your reputation. Your reputation affects how judges and opposing counsel deal with you, impacts your opportunities, and sets the tone in many negotiations. Having a reputation for error-filled documents hurts your reputation.
    • Your reputation is particularly important when it comes to getting and keeping clients. In this digital age, 88% of clients consider online reviews as trustworthy as personal recommendations and 90% of clients read online reviews before going to a business. Whether they’re looking at online reviews or getting recommendations from friends and family, your potential clients will hear about errors in your documents.
  • Time
    • The cycle of reviewing your documents, fixing any errors, reviewing the documents again, fixing any additional mistakes, and reviewing again can spiral almost endlessly, costing you precious time. Not only is reviewing documents over and over a time-sink, but the with every new round of review, you are less likely you are to notice mistakes. Additionally, each attempt at revision is a chance for new errors to sneak into your document, making the revision process that much longer.

How Knackly Can Help

Knackly offers you an alternative to the detrimental costs of errors above. Here’s what Knackly does differently to help you free yourself from mistakes in legal documents and recuperate lost time:

• Eliminate Typos and Wording Errors
  • Typos and wording errors typically come into your documents in the drafting process, where you are usually pulling provisions and language from older documents; those documents may have uncaught errors, outdated wording, spelling mistakes, and other problems.
  • To solve this problem, Knackly bases each of your documents on a master template for that document. Once you have done the initial work to ensure that the master template is correct and error-free, all documents based on that template will also be completely accurate and free of errors. By using a template for your legal documents, Knackly prevents mistakes in typing, copy/pasting, and outdated language.
  • This also makes updating your documents a snap. When you need to update language for a document, you simply make the change in the template and it automatically pulls into every new document created in Knackly.
• Ensure Information Accuracy
  • Mistakes in legal documents frequently come into your document when you are putting case-specific information like names, addresses, and other personal information into your drafts. Not only do errors enter your documents in this process from typos and entry mistakes, but you sometimes are working with information that isn’t correct – maybe your staff misspelled a name or transposed the numbers in an address when getting information from the client initially, or the client’s handwriting on their intake was difficult to read.
  • To prevent mistakes in adding personal information to your documents, Knackly ensures that you only enter information once. Then the information is automatically inputted everywhere it is needed in your documents, exactly as it was typed into Knackly.
  • This prevents names being spelled different ways in different places, mistyped addresses, and other mistakes in your case-specific information.
  • Additionally, to ensure that the information you are using is accurate, Knackly allows your client to input much of the personal information for you through an easy-to-use online interview. This allows you to rest assured that the information you have is exactly what the client entered. Such an online interview also creates a favorable impression on your client – not only does client-input information ensure that your documents have the correct data, but a smooth online intake process gives your client the impression that your office is modern and efficient.
  • Any time you need to update a piece of information, you simply go back into Knackly, change the information in the one place it is entered, and then regenerate the documents; the update will be applied everywhere that information is used.
• Time
  • Knackly’s error-reduction features will save you multiple rounds of document review and revision. With the confidence that your documents are based on an error-free and accurate template and that all specific information is exactly as it was entered in the online interview, you can drastically reduce the amount of time spent pouring over your drafts with a magnifying glass.

Through our document automation process, Knackly will improve the accuracy of your documents and greatly reduce or even eliminate mistakes in your legal document drafts. Not only will Knackly save you precious time in drafting and reviewing documents, but your newly error-free documents will help protect your reputation and give you peace of mind.

Our goal at Knackly is to save you time and improve the quality of your document drafts. We hope you’ll give us a call to find out more about how Knackly can help you.