One of the most important things you can do, as an attorney, is look out for yourself.
In an environment with litigious and reputation smearing clients, you should never work without a written and signed retainer or fee agreement. With the responsibilities of each party clearly spelled out, you can set the expectation for services from the beginning and prevent may client issues. With the signed retainer, you also have great protection against claims if the client is later dissatisfied for some reason.
- Begin by creating your retainer/fee agreement in google docs.
- Create your “tags” or data “placeholders” in the google document using curly braces like this: {{firstName}}, {{middleName}}, {{lastName}}
- You can use whatever descriptive tag names that make sense to you. Make sure they are descriptive so you can readily identify them when in the step that involves Zapier.
- Make sure this document is saved in a unique folder in your google drive account. It will be in that folder that all newly generated documents of this type will appear.
- Be sure to share this folder with the other members in your firm so if they are generating documents, they can find them easily.
- Now go to Zapier.
- Create a Zap with the trigger app being Prima.Law.
- Choose the trigger of “Update Case”
- Begin to configure the Zapier template.
- As shown in the video, because we are generating a promissory note, we add some date formatting actions to give us the deadlines for the future 4 payments. You can add more, but let’s be honest… you shouldn’t be taking more payments than that.
- Then as the action, choose Google Docs.
- Choose to “Generate a document from template” as the action.
- On the next screen you will see fields for all the tags you made {{firstName}} –> these things.
- Choose which data should populate each field and then test and enable the zap.
- Then go try it out.
- Remember, to trigger the “Zap” you need to click “Save” in the “Case Details” tab in the case.
James