Protection. Rights. Justice. Results. 

Spencer Sheehan is a Long Island, NY, consumer class-action attorney who focuses his practice on helping citizens who have suffered some harm at the hands of a large business. 

His work has won him much acclaim, and even some interesting nick-names, like “the Vanilla Vigilante” for his work protecting consumers from “food fraud” by ice-cream, almond milk and other manufacturers trying to pass off fake, chemical-based “vanilla” as the real thing.

Taking on big companies on behalf of consumers means taking on the big law firms that those big companies can hire - and all of their big resources as well. 

Spencer wanted to make certain that he and his team stayed focused on the substantive matters of his documents that help him better protect consumers. He needed to automate the routine documents and forms that don’t add value: Summons, Civil Cover Sheets, captions and address blocks for pleadings and so forth.

It’s the small things that can add up

As someone who spends much of his time defending consumers from corporate over-obfuscation, Spencer knows that it’s important to describe his often complicated class-action practice in terms that anyone can understand: 

“We deal with what most people would think of as relatively minor issues, like little collective pebbles in our collective shoe.  Typically we would all just keep walking with them, until it gets really really uncomfortable and fortunately, we have a way to stop that.  We collect all of those pebbles and come up with ways to keep that from happening or at least to compensate people for those issues.”

Spencer took a similar approach when evaluating document automation solutions. A few years ago he came across a legacy product and was impressed by what he could do with it. He carefully examined how several document automation products worked and found many of them “full-featured” but, unfortunately, not “intuitive” to use.  

While these solutions had more capabilities, Spencer was concerned that “the amount of time to grasp those capabilities was just too daunting.” Indeed, Spencer felt that “the technology seemed more appropriate for enterprise-sized law firms rather than solo or smaller firms,” 

Choosy lawyers choose . . . Woodpecker

Ultimately, Spencer evaluated five additional well-known document automation vendors before finally selecting Woodpecker. Woodpecker, in Spencer’s words, “makes things easier for me and my team, and less time-consuming.” 

Spencer appreciates using “the intuitiveness of the user interface, as well as the fact that it works in Word.” He can build variables and fields directly in the document in which he is working instead of being forced to work in a Web application. 

Woodpecker saves time when dealing with those routine documents and forms; Spencer’s team can use Woodpecker to adjust specific variables, such as the the address, county, and court location without having to start from scratch or copy and paste content from a previously used document.  

Woodpecker makes him confident that he is systematically reducing the chance for errors in his documents. Spencer estimates that the upfront time he spent setting up his templates now saves every attorney at his firm at least “an hour or so a day.” 

Spencer helps us reach our goal of making lawyers’ lives better

Spencer also appreciates the responsiveness and friendliness of Woodpecker’s success and support teams. In fact, we’ve done a lot of work with Spencer: he’s sent us new feature requests and suggested additions and changes, several of which he’s seen implemented.

Some companies might get annoyed at that. Some companies might even try to charge more for that. At Woodpecker, we love this engagement and thrive on it. Our customers are at the heart of everything we do and we plan on keeping it that way.

Yes, really.  We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: our job – our only job – is to make your life better and more efficient. We love it when our customers work with us to help us achieve that singular goal.

Get a taste of the real deal today

We used to think that we were something more than just a “plain vanilla” kind of solution; that would have seemed boring to us. But then Spencer taught us that vanilla only seems like something simple, because it hides a wondrous complexity - one that we might only notice when it’s faked or unreal. 

Spencer recommends Woodpecker to his colleagues; he knows the real deal when he sees it - and here’s your chance too. 

You might also like