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Legal Agreement Drafting on the iPad

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I’ve been experimenting with paragraph numbering (outline and legal numbering) in the Word compatible iPad word processors. This is of particular interest to me because drafting business agreements is part of my daily routine. While I plan to do a comprehensive test at some point similar to what I did for pleadings and basic formatting, I wanted to post up some interim results and related thoughts.

Today I opened up a blank page in Documents to Go Premium (iTunes Link) and typed up simple document in “business agreement” style using the legal numbering style built into that app (1, 1.1, 1.1.1, etc.). I used lorum ipsum for the text, but generally tried to format it similarly to how I would format a normal business agreement. Once complete, I opened it up in a desktop version of Microsoft Word to see how it looked. Click on the thumbnail for a full size PDF of the agreement as it looked on my desktop machine.

A few thoughts:

  • As a general matter, this would work if it needed to. The agreement is readable, the numbering provides the organizational structure I intended and it opened in a desktop version of Word without trouble. While the formatting is not the same as I would create with a desktop version of Word, it is certainly serviceable.
  • The paragraph indentation options in the app quite flexible. I think I could have made adjustments so the output more closely resembled my firm’s preferred style. But, there is no way to save these custom setups as “styles” in the app. So, to create a document with precise formatting would take a lot of work each time.
  • To “finalize” this with formatting style consistent with that used by my firm would require slight tweaks to just about everything. I’m fortunate to have an assistant that helps me with this type of task, but as any person experienced in word processing knows, it is often preferable to apply formatting “fresh” rather than reformatting a document with formatting already in it. My assistant confirmed this observation as to this test document.
  • There is no easy way to “tab” on the iPad keyboard. So in a number of places, I had to space over to create the look I wanted. Again, functional but not ideal.
  • Using lorum ipsum for text let me focus on the effort required to apply formatting in one of these apps on the iPad. It is OK, but not great. It was certainly more time consuming than applying formatting on a desktop machine (mostly because keyboard shortcuts are not available for many tasks on the iPad).
  • While I did this test in Documents to Go Premium (iTunes Link), I think I would have come to a similar result in QuickOffice Connect Mobile Suite (iTunes link) but Pages (iTunes Link) and Office2 HD (iTunes link) performed less admirably than the first two apps I mentioned in other tests.

I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the output the app created. For me, however, this test just reinforced my preferred workflow of drafting in plain text rather than in a Word compatible app. Even though serviceable, I do not need to create a final version of the document on the iPad – it will go through some process before going out the door. My assistant says she can more efficiently apply desired styles to plain text than “fixing” formatting generated by the app. Of course, efforts at formatting take me away from the writing process. When I have 20 minutes to bang out some work for a client, I need to be creating product; not formatting it.

That said, if you don’t have an assistant to assist with formatting or if you choose not to worry about precise formatting, then these apps may be workable alternatives for creating near final versions of business agreements on the iPad.

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