Legal Forms, Documents, and Contracts Can Save Time



Denise Annunciata

Lucy Lawyer, a junior corporate associate at a small New England firm, is working diligently on her first acquisition involving a manufacturing plant for a new client, an Illinois corporation. Brian de Partner tells her that she needs to prepare the authorizing resolutions for their buyer client. Lucy has never done resolutions for an acquisition before nor has she ever prepared resolutions on behalf of an Illinois corporation. Her work comes to a grinding halt. Brian de Partner is very busy and asks her to figure it out. Where does she turn?

How often are we, as legal professionals, frustrated by the realization we’re not sure what steps to take to accomplish a particular task in the best practice way?

Most legal projects do not start as a blank slate. They may involve deal specific terms and provisions but, for the business practitioner, they very often involve universal “core information" as required in many other projects. For the legal professional, that means gathering and accessing the proper tools to initiate and perform the project at hand. It may be locating a good initial drafting form. It may be searching for a link to a relevant statute. It may be finding a seasoned paralegal to consult. But there are always certain procedural resources that the practitioner will utilize on a repeat basis to perform the legal work most efficiently.

When those tools are not readily available it translates into lost productivity and ultimately lost revenues; time is wasted.

The legal industry has hundreds of vendors offering various legal resources. Westlaw™ and Lexis™ are industry standard sources for substantive research for the litigation professional: citations, treatises and other legal information. Resident agent service companies such as National Registered Agents, Inc. (www.nrai.com), CT Corporation, and many others provide excellent web sites for obtaining state forms and state-specific filing information.