By Angela Crossland

There is always a lot of focus in the legal industry on new technology. At the moment, AI, automation and collaboration tools are understandably getting a lot of attention.

At the same time, something I’ve been seeing more and more, is that the practical knowledge around document production is becoming harder to find inside law firms. A lot of the people who really understood legal documents, and how the solutions that support them behave, learned that through years of working with them. When those people retire or move on, that expertise often goes with them.

For many years, firms relied on people who had spent a long time working directly with documents. Often that knowledge came from individuals who started in secretarial or document production roles and developed deep expertise in Word over time. They had seen how documents break in real situations, and understood numbering, styles and templates in a very practical way.

The way lawyers work with technology and the structure of their support teams has changed a lot since then.

Support teams are leaner and lawyers are expected to be more self-sufficient. Word is also seen as such a familiar tool that it is easy to assume everyone already knows how to use it effectively.

When the fundamentals get overlooked

In reality, Word is far more complex than it appears, particularly in legal environments.

Law firms rely on it for long, structured documents, complex numbering, collaboration and reusable content. Over time, those documents get pushed quite hard, and that is usually where the problems begin.

It might start with something small. A set of clauses where the numbering behaves differently than expected. A document that works initially but becomes unstable as more people work on it.

What we often see is that these small issues build up over time. Eventually, people can spend more time fixing issues than actually writing.

Without the right expertise available, those problems can be surprisingly difficult to diagnose.

Take, for example, a healthy well-structured document that is professionally presented and is neatly formatted to your firm’s house style, with paragraph numbering that behaves in a predictable manner. Once that document is sent externally, there is no control over how it is edited. When it comes back, people still need to be able to work in it without the numbering breaking.

New technology doesn’t remove the foundations

Technology is moving quickly. AI can help generate content and collaboration tools allow multiple people to work on documents at once, but the structure of the document and reliable clause numbering is still key.

If the template underneath is unstable, or numbering becomes inconsistent, those issues eventually surface regardless of what other tools are in place.

Word may not be the most exciting technology in the stack, but in legal environments it still sits right at the centre of how work gets produced.

It is great to benefit from the efficiencies of automated content and AI-generated clauses, but that text still needs to be embedded into legal documents in a way that works, without conflicting with the structure of the document. 

Experience still makes a difference

One of the things we often see when working with firms is how much difference experience makes in this area.

Understanding how Word behaves in complex legal documents usually comes from years of working with them and seeing how things break in real situations.

That perspective can be difficult to recreate once it disappears.

The technology will continue to evolve. But well-structured templates and stable documents are still what every law firm depends on.

It is also why we are seeing more firms look for support in this area. Not just for tools, but for the experience behind them, to make sure the foundations are set up in a way that actually works in practice.

Our team brings over 150 years of combined experience working in and with law firms, and an in-depth knowledge of legal documents.We are increasingly helping firms fill that gap where that knowledge no longer sits in-house.

Here’s where you can get in touch – Contact us