I had a pro bono video call last week with someone who wanted to incorporate a new legal entity for a social enterprise. She was wondering whether she should set it up as a charity or as a community interest company so that she could attract grant funding. Her value proposition was providing yoga-based therapy through online classes, to help manage anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. She already had more than 10 years’ experience as a yoga teacher.

My immediate impression was that her offering had immense value in the corporate world, including via the HR teams of corporates, financial institutions and professional firms. By giving access to the online yoga therapy to staff members, those teams could be ‘doing the right thing’ from a social perspective, whilst also improving productivity. There was probably no need for that enterprise to receive grant funding, and there was nothing to stop the enterprise also providing therapy for free to those in need. Her next step was probably just to communicate the benefits of her online therapy with more people, and to charge for it in line with the value she was providing.

My experience on that video call inspired me to take some of my own advice, so I thought I would share with you some of the benefits of document automation.

One of the reasons I’m so passionate about legal document automation, is that it doesn’t just allow people to produce legal documents faster and to avoid mistakes. (Although this benefit alone is very significant – it can reduce the time required to produce documents from days to minutes.) Document automation also accesses the collective expertise of a much wider group of people: in our case, our team of lawyers at LCN Legal plus the dozens of professionals worldwide who have used our tools and who have very kindly shared their feedback and suggestions. This adds up to hundreds of years of collective experience, meaning better questionnaires, better documents and better protection for the end-users.

So far, the tools we’ve created cover:

• draft intercompany agreements for transfer pricing compliance for the most common transaction types
• a scoping tool to identify the key intercompany agreements types likely to be required to support a particular group’s transfer pricing compliance (free)
• loan note instruments for documenting related party debt
• suites of documents for implementing common elements of group reorganisation projects (such as share exchanges, capital reductions and hive downs)
• a preliminary assessment to identify whether a cross border arrangement is likely to be reportable under DAC6 (free)

You can find further details of those tools here. As well as using them for our own internal purposes, we make them available to others on a pay-per-use or license fee basis.

If you would like to learn more about our automation tools, or if you would like help in creating bespoke tools for your own business or practice, please reply to this email and let me know. I will be very happy to arrange a demo and to explain how they work.

N.B. If you would like to know more about yoga-based therapy courses to help manage anxiety and PTSD, please let me know, and I will be very happy to put you in touch.