A draft that needs an hour of fixing
Your product drafts a facility agreement from a term sheet. The words are good. When the associate opens the Word document, the clause numbering is typed as plain text, so inserting a clause means renumbering by hand. Schedules restart at 1 in the wrong places. Cross-references say see clause 14.2 as fixed text, which is wrong as soon as anything moves. The font is close to the firm's house style but not quite, and the defined terms are bold in some places and not others.
The associate sends it to their secretary, who rebuilds it in the firm's template. The time your product saved on drafting goes into formatting.
Why generated documents fight Word
Law firm documents rely on Word features that are easy to lose when generating documents in code: styles, multilevel list numbering, fields for cross-references, and templates with the firm's settings.
- Text is written with direct formatting such as font and size, not the firm's named styles.
- Numbering is written as text rather than using Word's numbering linked to heading styles.
- Cross-references are typed as numbers, not as fields that update.
- Documents start from a blank file, not the firm's template with its styles and settings.
- Each firm's house style differs, and your product has one output format.
What broken formatting costs
Fee earners judge a drafting product by the document they open. If it needs rebuilding, they stop using the product for anything important, however good the text. Secretaries and document production teams resent the extra work, and they are often the people who decide whether a tool gets used in practice. Formatting errors that survive, such as a wrong cross-reference, can also make it into documents sent to the other side.
The problem compounds on long documents and later rounds. A facility agreement or a share purchase agreement goes through many turns of drafts, and each turn adds manual fixes on top of broken structure. By the third draft, nobody can trust the numbering, and the document production team rebuilds it from scratch, which is the work your product was supposed to remove.
How we build output that fits the firm's templates
What we build generates documents inside the firm's own Word setup, rather than imitating it.
- Firm templates loaded into your product: the firm's .dotx files with their styles, numbering definitions and settings, for each document type.
- A style mapping per firm: your product's structure (clause heading, sub-clause, definition, schedule heading) mapped to the firm's named styles.
- Numbering applied through the template's multilevel lists linked to heading styles, so inserting a clause renumbers everything automatically.
- Cross-references written as Word fields pointing to bookmarked clauses, so they update when clauses move.
- Defined terms formatted by style, consistently, with an optional check that every defined term is defined.
- A validation step on every generated file: numbering continuity, broken references, direct formatting outside allowed places, and style use, with problems flagged before the fee earner sees the document.
| Problem | How the output handles it |
|---|---|
| Clause numbers typed as text | Word numbering linked to heading styles |
| Fixed cross-references | Fields to bookmarks that update |
| Font close to house style | Firm's own named styles from its template |
| Schedules restart wrongly | Numbering definitions from the template |
| Inconsistent defined terms | Style-based formatting and a definition check |
We build this with the firm's document production or knowledge team where possible, because they know which styles matter and which are legacy.
The facility agreement, second time
The associate generates the draft again. It opens in the firm's template with its styles. Clause numbers are live, schedules are numbered correctly, and cross-references are fields. They insert a new clause 9, and everything after it renumbers, including the references. The secretary opens the document, checks the styles pane, finds nothing unusual, and moves on to other work. The validation report attached to the draft shows no problems.
Is formatting undoing your drafting product?
- Fee earners send your drafts to secretaries to rebuild.
- Clause numbers in generated documents are plain text.
- Cross-references do not update when clauses move.
- Every firm gets the same formatting from your product.
- You do not check generated files before users open them.