The legal industry is ever-changing, but the need for accurate, compliant legal documents remains constant. Almost every task lawyers perform — from client intake to drafting employment contracts and pleadings — requires new documents.
Unfortunately, creating these detailed documents from scratch can be incredibly time-consuming.
Luckily, document automation solutions can streamline this process, saving time and effort.
We’ve identified the seven best legal document automation platforms available, each offering unique features. Let’s explore what we found.
Top 7 picks:
- PandaDoc: Best for end-to-end document management automation
- Gavel: Best for customizing legal workflows
- HotDocs: Best for automating repetitive legal documents
- Rally: Best for collaborative legal document creation and approval
- Cilo Draft (formerly Lawyaw): Best for all-in-one practice management
- CosmoLex: Best for tailored legal workflows
- Checkbox: Best for custom workflow automation legal apps
How to benefit from document automation software
Legal document automation software allows law firms to generate documents automatically using templates. Instead of drafting documents from scratch, firms can upload existing contracts to create editable templates with pre-fillable fields.
Alternatively, they can use a template library of pre-designed legal documents, such as NDAs and employment offer letters, which can be customized to meet specific needs.
This significantly speeds up the document creation process.
Numerous benefits arise when law firms adopt the right document automation software. Here are just a few:
- Enhances document accuracy: automatically fills in client information, reducing human errors.
- Empowers law firms: allows team members to use and edit templates based on permission settings, speeding up document creation and accelerating collaboration, even remotely.
- Facilitates up-to-date document generation: provides access to current, regularly updated templates, ensuring accuracy from the start.
- Serves as a knowledge repository: centralizes document storage, making it easier to maintain and access documents, and simplifies onboarding.
- Streamlines contract negotiations: allows for document version control and uses redlining to highlight changes, making collaboration and finalization faster and more transparent.
7 best document automation software for law firms
1. PandaDoc: Best for end-to-end document management automation
Who it’s for: legal professionals looking for document automation, e-signatures, and streamlined contract management. It will suit both solo practitioners and small law firms seeking simplicity and speed in handling legal documentation.
Price: $19 per user/month for Essentials and $49 per user/month for Business when billed annually. Enterprise plan pricing is available by request.
G2 rating: 4.7
Free trial: yes, 14 days + free version
First on the list is document automation software from PandaDoc. Here are the reasons why:
PandaDoc has a library of professionally designed and customizable templates to assist in the document creation process.
Starting with smart fields that populate customer data from a CRM or customer service software into a document, users can customize a template with branding capabilities, like adding a logo or changing the color palette.
Alongside pre-made templates for legal document management, PandaDoc offers a range of document automation features, like uploading docs of their own, turning them into templates, or creating copies inside a built-in editor.
Drag-and-drop functionality makes the process smooth and fast, and the content library stores clauses and terms that you can add to a copy with just a few clicks.
When it comes to approval, the platform’s document management software works efficiently here. It puts each approval into one automated workflow, which facilitates the process of completing legal documentation.
You can assign roles and use built-in commenting with your team members to speed up the process.
Using the contract negotiation feature, law firms can suggest and discuss edits to a document with key stakeholders.
You can also track suggestions that have been added to your document under its version history or resolved comments or suggestions.
Integrations are another strong “yes” for PandaDoc.
The solution currently includes over three dozen business tools you can connect to within its automation system, such as CRM systems, payment solutions, video conferencing tools, and more.
Another huge plus here is that each category has multiple tools.
For example, you can offer clients the option to choose between Stripe, PayPal, Square, or other payment gateways when it comes to paying for legal services.
A huge pro is how PandaDoc prioritizes privacy and security, and is SOC 2 Type II certified and HIPAA, FERPA, and GDPR compliant.
When speaking about cons, some users have expressed limited customization options in certain aspects — for example, formatting.
Others desire having a wider variety of integration options — which is a valid concern but also something that PandaDoc is always increasing in number. (To keep it transparent here, PandaDoc offers more integrations than other tools on this list.)
2. Gavel: Best for customizing legal workflows
Who it’s for: large legal teams and in-house legal departments requiring legal document automation and workflow customization for complex legal processes.
Price: Billed annually, with two months free: $83/month for Lite; $210/month for Standard; $290/month for Pro. The Scale tier starts at $417/month.
G2 rating: 5
Free trial: Yes. 7 days free on all tiers except Scale.
Gavel, formerly Documate, markets to the legal industry only. It functions as a web-based portal and Microsoft Word add-in.
Like in most document management software, legal firms can create templates for any documents in Gavel and then clone, edit, and re-use them.
Guided Interview is an interesting feature, as it uses the client’s answers to automatically generate documents, for both transactions and litigation.
A user sends out the web-based interview to a client, and after questions are answered, information will be added up to create a document.
Like PandaDoc, Gavel offers custom branding options to customize a domain and apply styling to automated legal documents.
Law firms can create client profiles in Gavel and hand over access to customers themselves. It is a handy feature where customers can store data and may elevate the client experience.
Gavel positions itself as a developer too — the platform can build custom features and offer consultancy services for those companies that need advanced settings.
Gavel also comes with integration options like Word, Stripe, Zapier, Google Sheets, DocuSign and HelloSign.
Law firms can utilize Stripe integration to accept ePayments, and DocuSign or HelloSign to enable electronic signature features.
What it lacks, however, is a broader selection of seamless integrations. Seeing CRMs on the list would make a huge difference.
Another feature absent here is ready-made templates.
It is good to have the ability to create a template from scratch; however, having pre-designed templates from the start would save more time and effort and is a strong addition to any law practice management software.
3. HotDocs: Best for automating repetitive legal documents
Who it’s for: legal professionals and large law firms seeking advanced document assembly and automation for complex legal documents.
Price: Contact the vendor to schedule a demo and discuss the latest pricing options. Review sites claim prices start at $25 per user per month, with a minimum of 5 seats ($125).
G2 rating: 3.8
Free trial: No
HotDocs is a well-known solution in the legal industry — they’ve been on the market since 1993.
The company offers document automation software for many business sectors, the legal industry being one of them.
HotDocs is a “yes” when it comes to the variety of integrations with business systems — BPMs, CRMs, ECMs, document management, and risk management are all on the list.
In general, HotDocs has a similar workflow to Gavel with respect to how their document assembly software functions. Once a law firm uploads a document to the system, it is converted to a template.
The interviewing process helps to enter the client’s data and put it in the document.
The tricky side of HotDocs is that it requires a developer or someone with coding experience to actually create templates. However, HotDocs has found an optimal solution to this issue.
They have trainees who guide customers through every detail of template creation — and, according to G2 reviews, this process works.
All templates are customizable.
For example, there are a bunch of conditional text areas, meaning that users can select which text will be added under certain conditions.
Although HotDocs is a cloud-based solution for automated legal documents, it has offline access as well, and legal professionals can use templates without accessing the Internet.
UI is what catches the eye when using HotDocs; unfortunately, we don’t mean that in a complimentary way.
Here you won’t find any lightweight or efficient, minimalistic pages like those that PandaDoc and Gavel offer.
On the contrary, pages are overwhelmed with text and an outdated corporate style, which may make it difficult for some to navigate between pages — especially when the goal here is document automation for lawyers.
4. Rally: Best for collaborative legal document creation and approval
Who it’s for: IP lawyers and medium-sized legal firms focused on intellectual property management and risk assessment.
Price: $99/month for Lite; $399/month for Essential; $999/month for Premium.
G2 rating: 4.3
Free trial: Yes
Rally positions itself as a legal tool for businesses and their lawyers.
They emphasize the ease of usage, and accordingly, their UI looks user-friendly and clear.
Rally is one part document automation, one part contract management.
It integrates various functionalities essential for those two components to sync, and therefore stands out in the market.
The essential thing Rally does is connect law firms with clients. It has a client portal that is accessible for clients to log in and sign documents.
Apart from e-signatures, the portal facilitates online payments, document storage, and custom branding.
In terms of data, Rally behaves like all other document automation tools. You can keep documents, templates, and messages in one place.
They also have a template library as part of their document management system; this makes document drafting easier for law practice areas.
You can issue an NDA, an employer contract, a DAO contributor agreement, a GDPR compliance agreement, and more.
And it’s easy to edit these documents — because of integration with CRMs, you can quickly extract the data you need.
Rally cares about security and employs multiple layers, from Amazon’s data centers to a suite of prevention, detection, and response tools. They are also CCPA and PIPEDA compliant.
Rally also serves as an e-commerce platform. They offer law firms the possibility of creating a store where clients can choose and pay for legal services.
When it comes to ranking as a comprehensive document management software, Rally does offer quite a bit of bang for the buck — but there are a few bucks involved.
It is significantly more expensive than other software solutions. For $399, you get document creation functionality similar to what Gavel provides — but Gavel delivers it for less than half the price.
Since Rally is used in various departments, and for all types of documents (not only legal ones), it can be a good choice for the entire company.
Conversely, if you’re seeking document automation for small law firms, or just a solution for the law department only, looking into alternative SaaS options might be a good idea.
5. Clio Draft (formerly Lawyaw): Best for all-in-one practice management
Who it’s for: small to mid-sized law firms using Clio’s broader practice management suite and looking for document generation and management.
Price: $70/month per a user for Cloud-Based Court Forms; $110/month per a user for Intelligent Document Automation; $75/hour for Template Services.
G2 rating: 4.5
Free trial: Yes
Clio Draft (formerly Lawyaw) promotes itself as a product that reduces time spent on routine legal drafting by using its auto-filling court form.
Another feature it provides: converting Microsoft Word documents into online templates.
In 2021, Lawyaw was acquired by Clio, a legal software for clients, cases, and billing. These tools complement each other and work well as a unified law practice management software.
At present, the company previously known as Lawyaw now goes by Clio Draft.
Clio Draft’s main task is to cut the time law firms spend filling out court forms. Using this solution, you can search and select thousands of official state court and immigration forms, save them as needed, and auto-populate the docs with client information.
Like PandaDoc, Clio Draft has a growing library of jurisdiction-specific templates you can use.
The company offers template-building services for those who lack the ability or time required for drafting documents of their own from scratch.
The tool also includes form libraries for all 50 states. Lawyaw started with California Judicial Council forms and simply kept adding more templates from there.
Today, anyone can access thousands of forms, from those at the state level to federal USCIS documents.
Like most tools on this list, Clio Draft comes with an e-signature feature.
Its built-in federally compliant tool helps prepare complex documents with client information and send them out with just a few clicks.
The embedded audit tool assists with case management, notifying clients and lawyers about the remaining steps in the process.
While Clio Draft delivers on its USPs around intelligent document automation and fillable court forms software, some users pointed toward enhanced workflows and better syncing between other Clio programs as improvements they’d like to see.
6. CosmoLex: Best for tailored legal workflows
Who it’s for: small to mid-sized law firms requiring a practice management solution that includes customizable workflows for document automation, billing, and accounting.
Price: $99/per month when billed annually.
G2 rating: 4.2
Free trial: Yes
As an all-in-one automation software, CosmoLex offers a comprehensive solution for legal practitioners.
It integrates case management, billing, and accounting into one app, helping law firms streamline and simplify their daily operations.
One of CosmoLex’s standout features is its billing and accounting capabilities, which prevent the most common mistakes and oversights in this domain.
This tool also automates task tracking and calendaring, helping avoid miscommunication and late payments.
In terms of expanding the platform’s functionality, CosmoLex integrates with LawPay for credit card processing and also has a built-in e-signature integration with Office 365.
Compared to PandaDoc, CosmoLex has a pretty small list of integration options, though it may be enough for some teams.
CosmoLex is flexible in adapting to the team’s needs, allowing companies to create task workflows and load them into new or existing matters.
This customized workflow enables automated control for improved deliverability and ensures the platform meets changing requirements.
7. Checkbox: Best for custom workflow automation legal apps
Who it’s for: corporate legal departments and larger firms that want to build custom internal apps and automate legal workflows without coding.
Price: Specific pricing details can be requested via its website.
G2 rating: 4.8
Free trial: Yes
Checkbox is a no-code legal automation platform specifically designed to help corporate legal teams and law firms automate their manual processes.
Its easy and intuitive drag-and-drop interface makes Checkbox a solid choice for non-technical users to build and automate complex processes.
Checkbox stands out with its versatile functionality, making it an ideal choice for in-house legal automation. Features include a no-code app builder, decision-tree logic, data management capabilities, and integrations with Microsoft Office.
Enhanced with AI, Checkbox speeds up document automation for lawyers with processes like route requests, dashboard creation, ticketing, audit trails, smart forms generation, and robust analytics reports.
How we assembled the data for this review
Most tools that provide document automation for legal practices offer similar features with varying implementations.
As we compiled our list, we sought to identify the best legal document management software based on ease of use, functionality, user interface, and product USP.
Our data collection involved comparison articles, user reviews, and product websites.
For pros and cons, we evaluated customer feedback from independent sources like G2 and Capterra.
Accelerate contract review and negotiation with PandaDoc
There are many more solutions on the market than just the seven document automation software programs that we included on this list.
Our approach was to select tools that gain the interest of users, are able to streamline document generation, and have the modern functionality necessary to help law firms execute legal services in less time.
Yes, we’re somewhat biased, but our best choice is undoubtedly PandaDoc.
A combination of third-party integrations, document templates, and a modern built-in editor with smart fields optimizes the workflows for any legal practice.
The document management system helps streamline negotiations thanks to collaboration tools and tracking features that ensure all changes are saved.
Schedule a quick demo to see how our legal document assembly software can improve processes for your legal team!
Disclaimer
PandaDoc is not a law firm, or a substitute for an attorney or law firm. This page is not intended to and does not provide legal advice. Should you have legal questions on the validity of e-signatures or digital signatures and the enforceability thereof, please consult with an attorney or law firm. Use of PandaDoc services are governed by our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
Originally published May 16, 2023, updated September 17, 2024
