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Document disassembly (and then document assembly) with Baseline Solutions

An interesting tool for legal departments came to my attention on Charles Christian’s online American Legal Technology Insider, March 2010.

Baseline Solutions has launched a new legal document review tool called Baseline. Through a series of customizable ‘Playbooks,’ the system automatically inserts omitted language and deletes undesirable text from 3rd party documents. Baseline marks the document in Microsoft Word using track changes and hyperlinks clauses to a knowledge-base of expert commentary and best practices.”

Christian adds that Baseline costs from $139 per user per month (a free trial is available) and it particularly helps with routine documents such as Non-Disclosure Agreements, Service Level Agreements and software license agreements.

It sounds as if Baseline reverse engineers the other side’s document and modifies it to have more text that you want in it. If it does that, many legal departments might want to consider it (See my post of Oct. 19, 2009: four advantages of document assembly.).

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4 responses to “Document disassembly (and then document assembly) with Baseline Solutions”

  1. Andrew Davis says:

    The concept certainly sounds interesting. (I haven’t tried it, so I can’t comment on usability.)
    Some thoughts from my perspective as a document assembly vendor:
    1. In the way it handles 3rd party documents, Baseline sounds like a good complement to document assembly: Legal departments (and their internal clients) use document assembly to quickly produce consistent, legally pre-approved versions of ‘their own documents’; Baseline gives those people a tool to quickly markup ‘3rd party documents’ to incorporate the same sort of consistent, legally pre-approved wording.
    2. As with document assembly, the biggest impediment to adoption will likely be lawyers’ resistance to changing the way they work. They will need to invest time and effort upfront to create (and then maintain) useful ‘Playbooks.’ The Playbook content and logic will be very similar to that used in document assembly.
    3. Given the above, maybe Baseline should target organizations that already use document assembly.

  2. Just saw your blog post about Baseline (I’ve been playing catchup recently after the launch of Baseline).
    Rees, your reverse engineer analysis is right on. But Baseline does more. In addition to adding omitted provisions and deleting impermissible provisions, the tool inserts a hyperlink in a comment box identifying the clause by name and then linking to third party expert guidance. So users who want more information about a particular clause can access negotiation guidance, alternative clauses or explanation.
    As for Andrew’s comment regarding the complementary nature of Baseline to document assembly tools. I could not agree more and we have begun discussions with some leading providers about this.
    Thanks for your comments. I’d be happy to give you a quick demo of Baseline if you have some time or you can check out the video demo at https://www.baselinesolutions.com.

  3. Peter Rudd says:

    Scott,
    Is yr offer of a quick demo still on ?

  4. Peter: Absolutely, happy to provide you with a quick demo. You can reach me at scott@baselinesolutions.com. Look forward to speaking with you. Scott