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Modern legal teams face huge workloads and ever-shrinking budgets. In today’s competitive environment, with constraints on resources and expertise, manually drafting documents is simply no longer a viable option.
If you're not quite ready for - or your budget doesn't extend to - AI document generation, the advent of document automation software comes as a tremendous boon to legal teams. By streamlining common processes, automation software can be a massive boost to productivity for time-poor organizations. However, as any legal expert will tell you, the devil is often in the details.
With a large variety of competitors in the nascent field of document automation software, it can be difficult to choose which is the best fit for your business. While some software packages offer basic legal templates, others include features such as workflow automation, integrations with your existing tech stack, and performance analytics. Choosing the right software can transform how your team operates.
In this article we will survey the growing field of document automation software, delving specifically into different options to give you our recommendation for the best in the business.
Legal document automation software can be defined as a smart template system for law firms or in-house legal teams that automates the process of document creation.
Lawyers and legal teams often have to spend hours creating and editing contracts, NDAs, and other common documents, often by copying old ones and tweaking the details (such as names, dates, etc.). This is often time-consuming and prone to human error.
Document automation software provides an elegant solution that minimizes the risk of errors, while also increasing productivity by reducing the amount of time legal teams need to dedicate to menial tasks.
Giving your legal teams more time to dedicate to strategic legal work and client service without sacrificing professionalism and compliance, can be a game changer for busy teams that strive for more.
Selecting the right legal document automation software depends on your organization’s unique requirements, resources, and goals. The following is an overview of the main considerations to take into account when choosing the right software for your organization.
Smaller legal teams often need simple, intuitive solutions that don’t require extensive setup, while larger firms may prioritize scalability and advanced features to manage higher workloads. Whatever your team size, if you do not have access to extensive technical resources you will also need to access a no-code legal document automation software so that you can easily make adjustments to your documents and the information and data that your template ingests.
In-house legal departments may benefit from advanced matter management and collaboration tools alongside their document automation software in order to optimize workflow. In this scenario, simple, large volume automation can deliver significant aggregate time savings for the organization.
Traditional law firms often prioritize more complex capabilities to maximize efficiency, which requires significant and sophisticated technical resources at every level of implementation.
Evaluate whether a platform’s pricing model aligns with your budget. Subscription-based software may suit growing or thinly resourced in-house teams while per use software may suit those with very low or very high volume.
Importantly, it is worth ensuring that the software integrates seamlessly with your existing tools such as your document system (if not embedded in your matter management solution), email, or contract management systems, to avoid workflow disruption. For smaller organizations in particular, deploying unsuitable software can be a nightmare to correct.
Every legal department uses - or aims to use - a set of key templates across its organization in a consistent, repeatable fashion. Legal automation software allows teams to quickly generate accurate legal documents tailored to specific clients, cases, or jurisdictions by pulling in the relevant information for the specific circumstance.
However, things can change quickly and your templates need to be easily updated without need to revert to your technical team or to the vendor.
Beyond the first step of creating a document, the critical feature of document automation software is to streamline as many steps beyond this as possible, including assignment, approval and review steps, ensuring consistency and faster document turnaround times to your internal clients. This may include the ability for your business clients to self-generate documents where appropriate, reducing Legal Department workload.
Beyond document creation and workflow, stakeholders need to be able to securely share additional information, documents and engage in conversations about the legal work in real time.
Evolution of documents and processes lead to greater productivity across your entire organization. Your legal document automation solution should provide visibility into document usage, team performance, and overall efficiency to support data-driven decision-making.
Xakia combines document automation with complete legal matter management, providing in-house teams with a single, connected platform. Beyond document generation, Xakia offers contract lifecycle management, an intake portal, spend management, automation workflows, and reporting, giving teams visibility into the full lifecycle of their legal work.
By consolidating document automation with matter and spend management, Xakia offers a practical user experience, helping legal teams to organize their tasks from the first document, through the entire workflow – all on one centralized platform.
Pros: Well-known to be affordable, robust, and exactly what in-house teams need to manage their entire legal workflows.
Cons: Suitable only for in-house teams, not law firms
Best for: In-house legal teams seeking a quick-to-adopt, comprehensive and robust legal toolkit that includes document automation, but without the hefty price tag.
Checkbox.ai focuses on process automation through workflows that allow legal teams to build self-service tools without developer support.
Pros: Helpful for automating repetitive processes.
Cons: Limited in its other Legal Department capabilities, and not as broad as other tools.
Best for: Legal operations teams wanting to automate high-volume, low-risk tasks.
Onit is an enterprise-level solution designed for large organizations with complex legal operations. It combines document automation, contract lifecycle management, and workflow tools in one system.
Pros: Highly configurable, scalable, suited to enterprise teams.
Cons: Requires more onboarding and investment than smaller tools.
Best for: Large enterprises with complex legal operations.
Lawcadia specializes in spend management with a focus on compliance and risk reduction.
Pros: Suited to compliance tracking and audit readiness.
Cons: Less flexible for teams seeking creative workflow automation.
Best for: Regulated organizations needing strict process control and transparency.
LawVu offers a unified platform which brings together document automation, collaboration, and reporting.
Pros: Offers collaboration tools, reporting capability.
Cons: May be more expensive and not straightforward to adopt.
Best for: Larger legal teams able to integrate a complex software solution.
Each platform brings distinct strengths. Checkbox simplifies task automation and project tracking; Onit and LawVu cater to complex enterprise needs.
Xakia, however, stands out for in-house legal departments offering more than document automation. Its integration of matter, spend, contract, intake, and document management gives teams complete oversight of their legal function, without the cost or complexity of heavy enterprise tools.
For legal teams ready to move from manual processes to a connected, data-driven workflow, Xakia offers a modern, practical solution built for the realities of 2026. Book in a demo to find out more!
Jodie is an innovator, entrepreneur, and advocate of LegalTech. Her passion to give in-house counsel greater visibility and control to their legal operations is the driving force behind Xakia, an in-house legal matter management platform that is simple, powerful and affordable and services hundreds of legal teams - and thousands of lawyers - around the globe.
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