A law firm’s guide to
~20x
faster drafting
1,200
templates in 12 months
77%
of a legacy library retired
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Contents
Foreword
HotDocs, Contract Express, PatternBuilder: whichever tool your firm built its library on has become the bottleneck. Template changes take weeks. One person knows how to make them. The business keeps waiting.
What firms rarely see until they’re mid-migration is how much the old platform was costing them. Not just in licence fees, but in maintenance hours, workarounds and templates nobody dares touch.
This guide is for the people managing that transition. Every section draws on real migrations with real clients. Most of them wish they’d done it sooner.
From the foreword · A Law Firm’s Guide to Switching Document Automation Platforms, Avvoka
~20x faster
SFA drafting time drops from 3 hours to 10 minutes at a firm that moved off their legacy platform.
Hours to 10 minutes
SPA production time at a firm that migrated off Contract Express, without rebuilding their precedent library.
6 hours saved per deal
Document assembly time recovered at a European firm, from the very first template they migrated.
The real cost
Licence cost is rarely the bill. Add specialist team members, consultants, infrastructure, training and the real labour of maintaining complex templates, and the total cost of ownership quietly balloons.
The bottleneck problem
In most firms, traditional automation and template building sits with just a few specialists. Everyone else waits. When that person leaves or gets busy the queue builds. Practice groups stop asking. Lawyers go back to manual drafting.
“We have just one person who is basically responsible for building documents.”
Head of Technology, UK firm
The platform is falling behind
The legacy platforms haven’t really changed in years. The way lawyers work has. They now expect their tools to talk to each other, to plug into the systems they already use, to make the most of AI, and to feel as easy to use as everything else on their desktop.
First-generation automation was never built for any of that, and the workarounds have run out of road. That gap is what most teams are really moving away from.
Case snapshot
A large global law firm was paying £100,000+ a year in middleware just to keep their automation tool connected to their DMS. Within three months of moving to Avvoka, the middleware was retired. The integration now runs through a single API connection, owned by their in-house team. The saving paid for the migration in year one.
→
Middleware cost eliminated
→
Integration owned in-house, not by a third-party consultancy
→
DMS handoff reduced from hours to seconds
Start small. Move fast.
Most firms start in the same place: “We have two thousand templates, let’s move them all in six months.” In practice, big-bang migrations spread the team too thin, QA becomes unmanageable, and when something goes wrong there’s no focused resource to fix it.
Firms that succeed do it in phases. They start with a carefully chosen cohort, typically high-usage and moderate complexity, and move those first. They learn, refine the workflow and build momentum with early wins. Then they move the next wave.
The template audit: 80/20, housekeeping and prioritisation
Before anything moves, audit what you have. For each template, ask: is it actually being used? Is it the best version? Could it be consolidated with something else? About 20% of a firm’s templates account for the majority of document volume. The rest are edge cases, old variations and things nobody touches.
Use the moment
Migration is the single best opportunity you will get to clean house. The political cover of a platform change lets you retire templates people have been quietly protecting for years, consolidate variations, and re-engage practice groups with template ownership. Surface those questions in planning, not mid-migration.
Case snapshot · top-tier European firm
A top-tier European firm came to us believing they needed 1,400 templates migrated. After audit, just 312 were genuinely in use. The remaining 1,088 were retired during migration. An 18-month project completed in 7.
→
77% of the legacy library retired as dead weight
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Migration timeline cut by more than half
→
Practice groups re-engaged with their own template ownership for the first time in years
Three things decide whether a migration succeeds: what you move first, who’s on the team, and how you roll it out.
What to move first
Who you need
Sponsor
Budget authority and seniority to clear blockers fast.
Template owners
Know how templates are actually used day to day.
End users
Partners and associates who draft daily.
IT
Security, infrastructure and integrations.
Vendor
Brings the playbook, tooling and people who’ve done this before.
How you roll it out
1
Run old and new systems in parallel for 2–4 months.
2
Monitor adoption, output quality and support volume live.
3
Fix bugs and answer questions in real time.
4
Retire the old system only when the new one has earned it.
Each group has different success metrics. Plan for that, don’t hope they align on their own. A migration is a rare chance to fix what is broken, which means you rebuild rather than reproduce.
How Avvoka helps
Our Customer Success team runs this playbook with you, from template audit through to parallel-run cutover. You bring the legal and practice-group knowledge. We bring the migration expertise.
Case study · in practice
Top-tier law firm: 1,200 templates off two legacy automation platforms in 12 months.
1,200
templates
S 480 · M 420 · L 210 · XL 90
4
Avvoka FTE
Dedicated automation specialists
30+
years combined
Legacy-platform veterans
100
days to priority
All revenue-critical templates live
The approach
A decade of automation, from one-page letters to facility agreements with hundreds of conditional branches, spread across two legacy platforms.
Two waves: roughly 350 revenue-critical templates first, then the remaining 850 in rolling batches by size. Every template went through five stages: consolidate, convert, QA, early release, general release. A rebuild, not a lift-and-shift.
Outcome
100% of priority templates live by day 100.
The full 1,200-template portfolio migrated, consolidated and QA’d within 12 months.
Example programme
Rebuild, don’t lift-and-shift
Your lawyers open a document, fill in the fields, get the output. That part doesn’t change. What changes is behind the scenes: the template that used to need a specialist can now be edited by the template owner in minutes, not weeks. No developer, no waiting, no backlog.
Rebuilding takes more upfront effort than a straight copy-across. The payoff is a template library your own people can maintain long after the migration is done.
Technology is the easy part
Most legacy automation projects didn’t fail on technology. They failed because lawyers didn’t use them.
A tool that’s slow, hard to navigate or unpredictable will be abandoned for manual drafting every time. It happens quietly, then it happens permanently. A migration is the chance to break that pattern, but only if the rollout is treated as seriously as the technical work.
Case snapshot · global law firm
A leading global law firm adopted Avvoka across six practice groups after a proof of concept proved ROI with just one template, saving 6 hours per transaction on a live deal. Get the solution in front of partners and show the time to execution drop in real time.
→
6 hours saved per transaction on the pilot template
→
Six practice groups adopted following the proof of concept
→
Internal advocacy grew organically from the pilot cohort
Prove the value in the first 30 days
Advocacy doesn’t build on promises. It builds on visible wins. Track them out loud: hours saved per deal, time to close, errors caught before they leave the building. When the internal story shifts from “we switched platforms” to “this saved us three hours on the last deal”, sceptics become advocates.
Training is not one-size-fits-all
01
Most lawyers
Just want to generate documents: fill in fields, click a button, get clean output. Keep their training simple with a few example templates, step-by-step instructions and a support email.
02
Template owners and power users
Want to go deeper into template logic, conditional branches and hands-on editing. They need a different curriculum.
Two audiences. Two curricula. The firms that get adoption right treat them separately from the start.
Built for the work you’re doing now
The legacy platforms in this guide were built for a different era, without APIs, cloud infrastructure, AI or non-technical users in mind. Avvoka was built from the ground up for modern legal work: cloud-native from day one, every function available via API, and the structured data model that modern AI workflows require. ISO 27001 certified, SOC 2 Type II, full audit trails.
“One of the best platforms I have implemented in my career.”
Head of IT, CLS Holdings
Proven migration experience
The approach in this guide comes from working through these same problems across dozens of firms moving off HotDocs, Contract Express, PatternBuilder, DocAssemble and Berkeley Bridge. We know how to structure the migration, phase the rollout, and support lawyers through the transition. A well-trodden path, and one we walk with you.
06 Integrations
Connect Avvoka to the tools your lawyers already use.
Integrations · headless drafting
Your lawyers draft alongside an assistant. Headless drafting brings your firm’s templates, clause libraries and rules into Harvey, Legora, Claude and Copilot, while the engine and the control stay in Avvoka.
Claude
Live now
Draft from your templates and export, straight from Claude.
Connect →
Microsoft 365 Copilot
Available now
Draft through the questionnaire in conversation, changes tracked.
Marketplace →
Harvey
Early access
Your approved templates and clauses, without leaving Harvey.
Learn more →
Legora
Early access
Template selection and bulk drafting, inside Legora.
Learn more →
See it working
A 2-minute tour of the Avvoka connector in action: search the template library, draft with the details filled in and export the finished file, all without leaving the chat.
The full guide · PDF
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This paper is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Each firm’s migration path will be unique and should be tailored to your specific requirements, infrastructure and goals.