[Clipping: Newspaper clippings regarding local political news] Part: 1 of 8
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TExAS LAWYER January 13, 1992
MANAGEMENT
I
Document Assembly
Can Be Easier With
The CAPS SystemA good lawyer works on a document
until it's just right. An efficient lawyer
saves the document and reuses it for
another deal. An enterprising lawyer
marries the document to a capable
document assembly system and sells it
to other lawyers. A smart lawyer buys
the system.
This week we review CAPS, the
OFFICE
TECHNOLOGY
by Barry D. Bayer
Benjamin H. Cohen
Computer Aided Practice System.
Lawyers who wish to create a system
will need CAPS/Author; a less ex-
pensive CAPS/User is available for
those who wish only to prepare doc-
uments for signature.
SETUP, SUPPORT
DOCUMENTATION
An automatic installation program
decompressed and copied CAPS/Au-
thor's 1.3 megabytes of files from two
3 -inch microfloppy disks to our
hard disk.
Both the 600-page reference manual
and 175-page "workbook" are in-
dexed and have tables of contents, but
as the index terms are all CAPS jargon,
we sometimes couldn't find what we
needed unless we already knew the
appropriate command name. Even
when we got to the correct command,
we had difficulty with the dense writ-
ing, often unaccompanied by mean-
ingful examples. The context-sensitive
on-line help was sometimes more
helpful than the reference manual, and
telephone support, available weekdays
from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. CST, helped
when all else failed.
We suggest that any lawyer serious
about CAPS/Author should pack his
skis and head to Provo for a five-day,
$1,500 training class.
CAPS FEATURES
CAPS uses 16 different types of
"elements" as document building
blocks. "Menu elements" display lists
of user-selectable document or sub-
menus; "Fill-in elements," "selection
elements," "essay elements" and "list
ements" provide a variety of ways to
)tain information from system users.
Other types of elements can contain
text, other elements and program-like
scripts. "Document elements" are
primarily used for blocks of text and to
pull the blocks together into a com-
pleted form. "Computation elements"
can perform a wide range of math and
Barry D. Bayer is a Homewood,
Ill., lawyer, and Benjamin H. Cohen
practices law in Chicago. They have
written extensively on computers and
computer products. Their column
appears weekly in Texas Lawyer.financial functions. A "computation
element" can also perform logical
comparisons to select appropriate
sections of text automatically, alter a
menu depending upon a user's prior
answers, or insert nouns, pronouns
and verbs that agree as to number and
gender.
Once an element is entered into a
practice system, it appears on a pop-
up list and may be "pasted" into any
document. A standard library of reus-
able elements can be imported into a
nascent practice system, getting the
author off to a running start.
CAPS can link directly to Microsoft
Word 5.0 (not tested) or WordPerfect
5.0 or 5.1. Word processor formatting
codes imported to CAPS are preserved
when the final document is saved in
word processing file format. CAPS canA date computation element lets the
user input a date or print "the
___-day of---- _199
if the date is unknown. Finally, we
created a menu element listing the bill
of sale as the first item and a system
element with a system title and version
number. After completing any com-
plex element, we "ran" that element
to test for CAPS syntax errors.
When we thought we were finished,
we saved the work file and "ex-
tracted" it into a user-accessible prac-
tice system.
It took us nearly three hours to put
our bill of sale into a practice system.
Adding additional documents was eas-
ier, mostly because we could reuse
many of the bill of sale's 65 elements.
An affidavit of title, with 14 new ele-
ments, took less than 45 minutes. The
deed, with 30 additional elements,
took 65 minutes.
CAPS/USER
CAPS/User takes 1.1 megabytes of
hard-disk space. A 64-page manual told
us everything we needed to know to
create real documents from a practice
system. A secretary or paralegal using
a properly constructed practice systemCAPS/Author is expensive both in money
and learning time. As with any documentplan or tell the user that the estate is so
complex that a real expert should be
consulted. The system could then ask
the questions necessary to prepare the
appropriate instruments and output
the instruments, standard instructions
for execution, an analysis showing the
estate distributions including amounts
of tax due at the death of each spouse,
and even a statement for services ren-
dered.
VALUE
CAPS/Author is expensive both in
money and learning time. As with any
document assembly system, or even an
inexpensive list-merge system like
Overdrive or Blankety Blank, devel-
oping a set of documents is a signifi-
cant task that is probably not econom-
ical for a small firm. Our simple three-
document real estate system, for ex-
ample, required about six hours of at-
torney development time and may
save about 15 minutes of secretarial
time per closing.
The authoring system is powerful,
although poorly documented and not
easy to learn. Final documents are easy
to create from a well-drafted practice
system. This description, alas, fits
most of the document assembly pro-
grams we've reviewed.
We don't think most lawyers will
need or use CAPS/Author, although a
practice system with a good set of lo-
cal forms wouldeasily persuade us to
purchase CAPS/User.assembly system, or even an inexpensive SUMMARY
list-merge system, developing a set of CAPS is a powerful document as-
sembly system that can come close to
document is a g ni'ficant task that is emulating an expert system. CAPS/
probably not economic needs bettneeds bettealso import and save files in DCA (not c
tested), generic word processor and n
ASCII formats. U;
There are no direct hooks to deal
with dBASE or other data base pro- t<
grams, but CAPS can import informa- n
tion from the type of ASCII files that n
dBASE can generate. in
u
USER INTERFACE
The developer tried to create a
mnemonic command system but s
ended up with a pastiche of more than C
100 commands available on pull-down a
menus, keystroke combinations or m
both. Although three or four com- 0
mands are prompted at the bottom of 0
the screen, it took quite a while before
we knew where to find a given com- A
mand. q
h
DESIGNING AND BUILDING fc
A PRACTICE SYSTEM W
We decided to create a residential a:
real estate practice system consisting u
of a warranty deed, bill of sale and af- f
fidavit of title. We loaded a text file
from a recent deal into the CAPS e
Notepad, then cut sections of text n
from the Notepad and pasted them "
into document elements. ti
We replaced the word "Sellers" 0
with a computation element titled ti
"Seller or Sellers," and wrote a script It
to insert the singular or plural de-A
pending on the user's response to the
query "How many sellers are there?"
When it came time to deal with sa
"Buyer or Buyers" we had only to ec
create a new computation element, w
copy the "Seller or Sellers" script and ai
change each instance of "Seller" to t c
"Buyer." ai3 1
I
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[Clipping: Newspaper clippings regarding local political news], clipping, January 13, 1992; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc1404475/m1/1/: accessed July 11, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; crediting UNT Libraries Special Collections.