Many state and federal forms are being adapted to HotDocs, giving it great versatility. A spokesperson for Matthew Bender said it had been using HotDocs with its forms publications and plans to expand the program. No matter how cumbersome and tedious putting together a document may be, since lawyers almost always relegate the cutting and inserting to their staff, they wonder what could be so painful about the process. As competition becomes more intense, it gets harder for lawyers to justify billing for drafting repetitive documents from scratch. There are the risks of failing to change all the names in the previous version, for instance, or failing to remove an inapplicable clause.
Some documents are necessarily repetitive, though they demand some customization.
Interrogatories are an example because so many of the questions are the same from one case to the next. There are high-end packages that elegantly put together documents far more complex than a set of interrogatories. HotDocs, though, provides an easy entry for a firm to experiment with document assembly. It requires Word or WordPerfect, and works well with both. But even before that, lawyers could also get HotDocs as part of WordPerfect's 7.0 Legal Edition.