Transactional Support Excellence
February 19, 2021

Transactional Support Excellence

Garrett Lemons | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with HotDocs

We are utilizing HotDocs to help us with transactional drafting. While facilitating government-insured construction loans, there are often 30-40 documents that need to be drafted, much with the same information. We created templates of each of these documents as well as a master questionnaire. After completing the questionnaire, all necessary documents will be drafted in a matter of minutes. While setting up the templates took a decent bit of time, training, and learning, they save us six to seven hours of document drafting every day, allowing us to greatly increase our workload.
  • Personalized training. We were able to get an expert on a video call who walked us through solutions to each of our unique problems (i.e. all fifty states have different notary blocks, how can we auto-populate it when the state of the deal is selected?).
  • Team access. Multiple people can work with the templates at once, thus allowing the members of our team who deal with financials to work on their documents while others focus on the organizational and legal documents.
  • Once you have successfully drafted your templates, it runs incredibly smooth (barring any minor hiccups that happen with software updates) and efficiently.
  • This is a software written by coders. Unless you have a background in coding, some of the thought processes going into how to set-up a template are not intuitive. This is definitely software that you need guidance through. (The on-boarding template practice is a must.)
  • Some of the template building icons could be more defined and explained in a way that a non-coder could understand them.
  • There is no mass-document download. So we have to individually download 30-40 documents one-by-one instead of clicking "download all."
  • In the setup process, we lost a lot of billable hour time to creating templates.
  • However, since then, with our increased capacity due to less drafting time, we had our best year ever in the midst of the 2020 pandemic.
  • It has increased the amount of training required to start off in the transactions, but then allows more of us to complete work on these deals, ever increasing our capacity.
An attorney in a different area of practice (Wills & Estates) brought this program to our attention after witnessing how we typically drafted documents for these deals. He had come from a financial firm where they used it to create forms for trusts and retirement plans and thought it would greatly help in our practice. We got lucky in that we weren't even looking for software (we were honestly too busy drafting) and it managed to exactly solve a problem we weren't even aware that we had.

Do you think HotDocs by CARET delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with HotDocs by CARET's feature set?

Yes

Did HotDocs by CARET live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of HotDocs by CARET go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy HotDocs by CARET again?

Yes

If you are doing transactional documents, HotDocs is a game-changer. If there are only a few select variables that change while the remainder of the work mostly consists of form language, this is a program that will dramatically increase efficiency. Even the most technical and dense documents can be turned into a template, as long as you are willing to take the time to invest in future time saving.

However, if the majority of the work that you are doing is not constantly repeating, this may not be the software for you.