"If you’re a solo or small firm practitioner, chances are you do a fair amount of your own document production," Trent L. Bush writes in the latest ISBA Standing Committee on Legal Technology newsletter. "Even if you never touch a keyboard, someone on your staff spends a fair amount of his or her time generating those documents."

So shouldn't you be looking for ways to automate the process of document creation? Especially documents you draft again and again? "The traditional approach for handling these documents has been to save them somewhere on the computer system and customize them for each particular client, either by cutting and pasting, searching and replacing text, saving over forms, or some combination thereof," Bush writes. "While this is certainly a much better approach than busting out the old typewriter, it still has its problems."

That's where document assembly software comes in. It's much more powerful than garden variety search and replace and holds the promise of greater productivity and higher profits. But it comes at a cost and with a learning curve, and there are several options to choose from. Read Trent's article and learn the basics.