Chris Harvey calls himself a “Venture capital lawyer.” His firm principally represents venture capital funds, accelerators, and investors. This puts him on the “supply” side of our start-up economy, as a lawyer to the companies that fund the start-up companies that power our “New Economy.”

A couple of years ago, Chris “did a teardown” of what tools were out there to improve his practice. He knew that document automation had been around forever, and he kicked the tires on a bunch of products.

After exploring a lot of systems – both new and old – he couldn’t find a good solution for his kind of legal, transactional work. And so, he did some more digging and found Woodpecker through Zapier’s list of the best Microsoft Word Add-ins.

Before Chris became a lawyer, he was a web developer; he’s always had an eye for what looks right.

Hitting Ctrl-Z (“undo”) in the old Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V game (“copy” and “paste”)

Before he started with Woodpecker, Chris manually drafted his contracts and documents: “the closest we got to ‘automation’ was copy and replace.” He wasn’t alone in this; Chris told us that “A lot of people wondered if I was crazy – a lot of lawyers asked why would you need a tool like Woodpecker? Can’t you just use copy/paste?”

If Chris was crazy, then he was crazy like a fox; he understood that document automation wasn’t going to give him notable returns on one-off or rarely used documents. “Where I start to see some real miles on the value behind Woodpecker is on the forms we repeat, on our commonly-used forms, and also on documents that have a few fields.” That’s where Chris starts to realize Woodpecker’s payoff.

For Chris, understanding the value of Woodpecker doesn’t stop there. Chris applies the skills he leveraged as a website developer to document automation which enables him to convert contracts from text to code:

“At a fundamental level, contracts are often drafted in Word, which is an unstructured environment. Text doesn’t have many layers to it. Woodpecker does that for you, creates the layers – so you don’t have to do that.

What Woodpecker does is structure the data and strip that data out of the contract. Lawyers look at a contract differently than a layperson. A layperson looks at a contract and sees text. I look at a contract and think: that is a placeholder for something, perhaps a ‘party name’ - that is a defined field. That field may or may not match up with other fields in the contract.”

Because that might seem too abstract to some, Chris provided us with a concrete example of just how he uses Woodpecker to propel his practice forward:

“Here’s a good example, which I’m running into today: a client is on the Board of Directors of an early start-up company, but also at this early stage he’s the CEO, CFO, and other roles. I’m trying to modify a contract that I have for start-up funding into one for this specific company at this specific stage. But if I try to replace all instances of that person’s name across the whole contract set for all of those roles, I’m going to get a completely useless contract because of all of the repetition.

With Woodpecker, the content can be separated from the contract so that inputs and outputs can be separated. What stays stationary and shouldn’t be touched by anyone other than a lawyer is the contract terms themselves.

I can have a staff member edit that contract, but they never touch the non-editable elements of the document itself. They just change the Woodpecker fields on the right side of their screen – that’s all that they can and should touch. So, they can fix the problems that would come from multiple roles before those problems arise.”

Woodpecker helps Chris, as his website says: “Do Business at the Speed of Trust”

The website for Chris’ firm, Harvey Esquire, boldly features the motto: “Do Business at the Speed of Trust.”

Law is by nature an exacting, and therefore often, slow business. Woodpecker helps Chris make good on his motto.

He can trust his staff to work on contracts knowing that they can’t and won’t touch the legal parts. It’s all automated – he has set up the contracts the way they need to be setup, so Chris knows the legal agreements are structured correctly every time they’re prepared for a new client or matter.

It’s no surprise then that Chris is one of our most serious “Power Users”. He has a whole body of templates that he has built out using Woodpecker.

He’s set up conditional language in contracts so, for example, if there is one director on a Board of Directors instead of the usual multiple directors, his staff can click “one director” and Woodpecker will completely repopulate the document to make all words referring to directors singular and all pronouns singular. It won’t have phrases pertaining to multiple people such as “action by unanimous consent” or even signature lines for multiple people.

If he and his staff had to do this through copy and paste, he’d likely “miss 10 things,” but with Woodpecker he can “adjust and make it flawless.”

As just a few more of many examples, Chris has set up his documents to have different configurations for different jurisdictions such as California and Delaware, where the legal language might have to be different. Without Woodpecker, Chris would need to juggle multiple forms, making it difficult for him – and his staff – to move at anything like “the speed of trust.” 

He can also re-use any form he wants to share by stripping out all of the attorney-client privileged information that he is bound to protect. He just clicks one button in Woodpecker and all of that privileged information goes away. Finally, Chris has set up Woodpecker to connect whole sets of documents, to allow him and his staff to change the value for a field on one form and have it auto-populate across the entire set.

All of that is, in Chris’ words, “worth more than the value of my three Woodpecker licenses.”

But why stop with just automating documents? Chris is using Woodpecker to automate his entire practice

For our typical case study we’d stop here with a big sign-off and recommendation from Chris. But Chris has taken Woodpecker beyond the automation of documents into a realm of automating the practice of law in a way that even we at Woodpecker never quite expected.

Chris tells us that in his own imagination, this is where he gets excited and hair on the back of his neck stands up. Chris has taken the element of structuring the data in his documents to a point where he can now use that data to power other parts of his practice.

Chris asked our technical team if there is a place where we could store this structured information from his documents. Since we always try to do what we can to help our customers – and since we were admittedly intrigued by Chris’ vision here – we were able to help him move this data to the free, online database service, Airtable.

Chris spent 30 hours or so pulling data from the last five years of his documents to determine whether he could catalogue the 200 or so start-up companies that his firm has formed to figure out how to notify them to pay their taxes on time.

He knows regardless of how many notices he sends to those companies (and he sends a lot of notices), he’ll be the first person who gets blamed if one of them misses a deadline. He and his staff have previously relied upon a spreadsheet to do this; it’s time-consuming, unwieldy, and not as reliable as he needs it to be.

Chris is now using an online system called Zapier to make API calls from Airtable to Woodpecker (if you find that description bewildering, please know that an “API call” is a connection between 2 different systems).

This gives him an accurate, up to date, single source of truth from which he can start generating any type of form that a start-up company might need in their first year of incorporation, such as NDAs, advisor contracts, stock option forms.

He can generate forms on the fly with all of the fields filled out and with all fields mapped through Woodpecker which connects and drafts all of the related documents with just the push of a button.

But wait! There’s more! Chris is using Woodpecker to change the practice of law.

If you thought the last few paragraphs were really innovative and forward-thinking, guess what? You ain't seen nothing yet, because Chris’ plans don’t stop there.

Chris plans to use Woodpecker as a core part of a system to help lawyers like him (well, lawyers who should be like him) be more entrepreneurial. Chris has focused on the fact that lawyers, like all professionals, “have one thing that is important to them: error reduction.” The need to eliminate all mistakes, to reduce the error rate to zero, forces lawyers to focus on the mundane aspects of day-to-day work.

In contrast, the venture capitalists that Chris works with every day are focused instead on big goals; for them, one stroke of brilliance that can lead to the big win that will “replace all of the errors that person had made prior.”

Thus, for lawyers, as Chris tells it,

Every time he can use Woodpecker to pull out a variable or an option and turn it instead into a virtual checklist, it reduces the opportunity for human error accordingly. By using Woodpecker to strip out the factual inputs into a database and automating the top 100 forms, Chris knows that he can reliably get up to 80% complete in terms of a near-final product for a lawyer to review.

Even if you don’t have a grand vision for the future of law, Woodpecker can still help you make your practice of today that much better.

We continue to work with lawyers like Chris to create the new future of the law that he (and lawyers like him) envisions.

In the meantime, Chris frequently recommends Woodpecker to other lawyers that he knows and works with, folks looking for a low-barrier to entry, high-impact solution for modernizing their practice and customizing automated workflows to ultimately make their practice much more efficient.

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