Templates are one of the foundational things you must get in order in to start automating. This article goes through the process of how to create a template.

In general, I recommend that you improve your templates in phases:

1. Gather all of your templates into an internal template library. I show one I built in SharePoint with an interface in Outlook below.
2. Identify your high-value templates, that is the ones that are the highest volume or the easiest to allow the business to self-help.
3. Align and streamline these templates. You want to decrease them to the smallest number of variations. You want a core set of templates that you can use ideally across jurisdictions and business units.
4. Present these to your business requesters in a simple interface where they can self-help. I show such an interface I built in SharePoint below.
5. Put in place policies that decrease future "drift" of templates.

It may be that you are in a large legal department with hundreds of lawyers. Everybody has separate template libraries scattered around everywhere. Many people may even just store templates on laptops. The first step is to gather all of these into a single place where everybody can see everything. How many NDA templates do we have? Why do we have 400 different versions? Do we really need that many? These questions are answered below, but first we have to gather everything into one place. Next, I show you how to create a great internal template library.

YouTube video at https://youtu.be/PCxMoDo97bk

One of the simplest ways to improve your work processes is to have a library of standard templates. Building one would seem to be easy, right? All we have to do is make a shared network folder and point everybody in the department to it. Then the department doubles and we have over a hundred people working with the templates. There is no clear owner of each template, people make changes to the templates, sometimes people open a template and fill in all the details and click "Save" making it so we no longer have a template, and then somebody accidentally deletes a parent folder deleting hundreds of templates. This is a mess. It's mass chaos when everybody can do anything to any template.

To get the biggest benefits the fastest, we need to have multiple ways to access the library. By default is the read-only mode. Anybody in the department can search quickly among the templates of all teams, yes teams now need to clearly own their templates since only teams will have editing rights of their templates in editing mode discussed next. Then, when a user clicks on a template a copy of the template is downloaded to their computer and opened in Word. Any changes are then made to a local copy of the file, not the template itself.

The second mode alluded to above is editing mode. When a team consciously wants to edit their template. They have editing rights to the file and so they can consciously open it for editing and make changes.

Sounds too good to be true? Let me show you.

The time when you want to be searching for a template is when you receive an email. Someone emails you with a new kind of request and you think "I wonder if another team has dealt with something similar". Now your current first reaction would be to email three friends. Which random three friends would you email out of hundreds of colleagues? Perhaps your department has no template library so it's truly a treasure hunt. You give up and you look through your stash of templates you brought with you from your previous company or law firm. Go forbid you turn to Google and use whatever you find there. This only increases the problem: No standard templates in the department.

So now when you get that email, you can click the "Contract Templates" button in the menu of Outlook. A panel opens on the right with a tree of folders. The top level folders are for the different kinds of teams that exist in your department. Go into one of the folders and you see a list of teams. Then click on a team's folder and you see their tree of folders laid out in a way that is logical for them. But now you can explore the templates of all the teams without emailing random people. Clicking on a file anywhere downloads a copy of the file to your local computer and you can set downloaded files to open automatically in Word. Are you loving this already?

What if we don't want to go clicking around all the folders, but we want to see everything at once? There is a link in the bottom menu of the panel to "View all templates". This opens a SharePoint page with the entire tree of folders and files. Now you can search in the browser with ctrl+F.

Now for the Editing Mode. Let's say you truly want to edit the template itself. Well, you click on "Access and edits" in the bottom menu of the panel. This opens the template library in SharePoint with the normal interface that we know and love. Clicking on a file here opens it directly in Word where you edit the template itself. You can only edit files for which you have edit access as set out by SharePoint. All other files you will only have read-only access. If ownership rights need to be changed a current owner can manage them for the team's templates. Or get a global owner of the whole templates document library to manage who are owners for the entire team.

Do I have your attention? This is the first part in a series about Templates. This first part is the foundation for working with templates as a team. It's the very first step. Getting everyone on your team to put their templates into a single repository where everybody has appropriate access to them in a place that is convenient for everyone when they need them. Gather everything under the sun and let the teams organize them in a way that makes sense to them.

The code for this SharePoint web app is a little more complicated because we have a SharePoint portion and an add-in for Outlook. You need to meet the requirements for SharePoint Modern Script Editor, but you also need one account that creates a flow in Microsoft Power Automate and this flow requires Power Automate Premium. To install an add-in in Outlook requires that you place a file describing your add-in (called the manifest) on a public facing server. Thus you can't place this file on SharePoint, which is a private, closed server. You'll need to place it on Azure or some other public facing server.

Do I still have your attention and you're interested in this? You can find all the code, Power Automate Flow, and manifest for sale on PayHip. Feel free to book a call with me to discuss your situation. Perhaps you want something a little more customized. Perhaps you already want to go to the next step and trim down the number of templates that you have amassed. Perhaps you would like to categorize and leave notes in place about all your templates which would then automatically generate a live spreadsheet along-side your templates as your team goes through the alignment process instead of having to create it manually somewhere else. This is only the beginning.

You've gathered ALL the templates in the legal department into a single internal template library. You may have found thousands of templates like I did at a prior company. We need to get that number down. Working with thousands of anything is chaos. But where do we start? Start with the template types that you will get the greatest benefit with the least effort from improving. These will be your high-volume templates and templates that the business can easily self-serve. Our goal is to make it so business can run more smoothly, so identify the templates that are easiest to improve for this. I recommend that each legal team identify about five to twelve templates that they want to improve. This will give you a list of template types across the department.

Like I said above, our goal is to take thousands of templates and align them down to a couple dozen core templates at most. You may find that you still have hundreds of fringe templates that are complex and rarely used. Set those aside for now. We will focus on your core contract types.

So let's say you identify NDA's as a core template type that each legal team wants to improve. But now each legal team has their own NDA template different from everyone else's. We need to get that number down. Compare all the NDA's across each other. Identify the key parts and their key differences. Is there a reason for certain teams to have slight differences? Could they not just combine and use the same NDA template? You might find that there are justifications for differences. Perhaps you find that an NDA for R&D needs to look different from an NDA for procurement which needs to look different from an NDA for sales. But now we just took the number of templates from 40 down to 3. This is a huge win.

Next look at my sample guide for formatting templates. You should tailor it to your company and apply it to your templates. Move all negotiable business terms to the front page. Put signatures on the first page if possible. Move all lists to annexures. You want to transform your legal document into a business document and make it really easy for the business to work with. This makes it easy for them to do their job without having to come to legal for every little thing. It also makes it easy for legal to review. The other side will concentrate on the front page business terms when reviewing and psychologically will not be as interested in the legal terms.

YouTube video at https://youtu.be/FGLYH7Vx9n8

In Part 1 we made a single repository for all templates. We made it by default read-only for department members and then specific team folders of files are editable by the respective team members. But what if we want to reflect one of these folders to a SharePoint page for requesters to use who are not members of the department?

This is a great question, because your department might be the owners of the templates but have users who need access to a specific folder of templates. You would not want these users to have access to your entire template library because you need to curate and simplify the experience for them. Plus you have gathered every template under the sun so there may be thousands of templates in hundreds of folders. And you definitely don't want to make the rest of your company install a button in Outlook just to access your department's templates. So what can we do? The team can make a page on their SharePoint that the business goes to and has access to a specific folder of templates as shown inside the box in the screenshot above.

A requester can come to this page and always get the up-to-date version of the template they are looking for. They can click on the Word icon to download a copy from the template library to their computer and then open the local copy in Word to work with. We have also made it so they can click on the name of the template to open a dedicated page all about the template for some quick training.

Here the user can read briefly about the template they are using and read about the other templates they need in conjunction. There is a current thumbnail of the template on the right. There are links to a playbook and once again a link to the template for downloading. There is a "See also" section with links to related pages. And a list of trainings.

If you made it this far, you probably have noticed that this is a great way to distribute templates to your users. Your users can come to a dedicated page where they can get the most up-to-date version of the template. No need to email your team. Also, whenever your team makes changes to the template you don't need to email everyone letting them know. And you can put training right in people's hands for how to work with your documents.

Alright. So now you've gone through all the hard work of aligning and streamlining your templates. You've gotten them down from thousands to a couple dozen. You have created global templates wherein the applicable country can be indicated and all local nuances are applied appropriately. So how do we stop the drift from happening again in the future?

There has to be a cultural change. Lawyers cannot just simply go change the template and create a new version for themselves. We must keep going forward together.

I recommend that you create a template committee that reviews suggested changes. If France suddenly needs to add a sentence because of new European legislation, do not just let them add it for France. Perhaps the language needs to apply to all European countries? These other countries should be consulted on how the applicable language should appear to be appropriate for their needs.

The days of the wild, wild west are over. There needs to be organization and we go forward with intent.