What is Legal Document Coding?

Legal document coding is the process of taking a standard legal precedent and adding syntax to it so that it can be properly automated with legal document automation or assembly software.

Once a legal document is “coded out” it can then be used in legal document assembly software to take information from a database and complete the document assembly task to batch produce documents with the proper and relevant information.

In the old days, document coding in legacy platforms was extremely difficult as it required advanced knowledge in coding syntax similar to that of a computer programmer.

In addition to needing to understand the syntax, you would also need advanced knowledge in computer programming concepts like for loops, while loops and if statements.

An example of legal document coding might look something like this:

` THE UNDERSIGNED being [%[shareclasses :: votingSharesCalc:’is_confirmed’ :: countOf] > 1]all of the shareholders of the Company pass{/}…`

Whereas modern document coding simply uses an advanced word processor and drag and drop to let users “code” documents without code. The result being that all you ever need to see is:

THE UNDERSIGNED being all of the shareholders of the Company…

Sometimes, coding-based document assembly syntax comes with coding assistant apps, extensive documentation or large lists of variables.