#Smart Automation

Avvoka's Smart Automation streamlines various tasks by allowing users to "automate the automation".

Uploading a template to Avvoka instantly applies automation, saving time and eliminating the need to manually insert placeholders and conditions. You can also use the template management function to combine 2 or more documents into a single consolidated precedent.

To enable this feature, please contact your Account Manager.

I. Preparing your template for Smart Automation

To use Avvoka’s Smart Automation, you can prepare your template with specific markers:

For example, [Employer Name] uses capitalised first letters, enabling the system to recognise it.

Note: Running Smart Automation will consolidate placeholders with the same name into a single placeholder. For example, if a document requires the names of three founders and all placeholders are named "Founder," the system will create one question and populate the same name three times. You will need to manually alter placeholders with identical names to ensure they are recognised individually.

Note: If you intend to use “Advanced placeholder detection” (this feature uses AI) there is no need to prepare your template for recognition.

Smart automation can also detect placeholders in PascalCase format, like [EmployeeName].

Conditions:

1. From a precedent template (square bracketed followed by a footnote)

To automate conditions using Avvoka’s Smart Automation, enclose the text in square brackets followed by a footnote. This condition will be set out as “Attribute = Yes”. The text in the footnote will become the question:

For numbered paragraphs, wrap the entire line of text in brackets to avoid creating an inline condition. Place the opening bracket before the paragraph and the closing bracket at the end, then add a footnote.

2. From a precedent template (with Avvoka mark-up)

If you want to apply more advanced automation in your conditions, you can use this option. This is also useful when a template has square brackets and footnotes not intended as conditions.

When selecting 'From a precedent template (with Avvoka mark-up),' wrap conditions in curly brackets instead of square brackets. Insert conditional logic as superscript text just after the opening curly bracket. For example:

The table shown below needs to be followed to build the conditional logic:

The format will be: attribute operator_code answer. The superscript condition follows the opening bracket. Exceptions are PRESENT and NOTPRESENT, which require no "answer."

The following table is to be used for grouping conditions together:

Example: (att1 = Yes AND att2 = No) OR (att3 = No AND att4 = Yes)

Worked example of Avvoka mark-up:

For example, to include a clause in an employment contract about providing a company car, automate the condition in your template as follows:

You can see below that the condition about the company car is dropping in the document when the answer to the tied question has been selected as ‘Yes’.

Now, let’s take an example of a Present condition. In this case, if "Travel" is automated as PRESENT, the system automatically adds a clause about travel to the document without needing a ‘Yes’ answer as PRESENT simply detects the existence of an answer.

II. How to apply Smart Automation

After adding the necessary markers, upload your docx or save your template. Then, click the Smart Automation icon next to the save button, which looks like this:

If you can't find the icon, contact your Avvoka account manager to activate this feature for your organisation.

A pop-up window will appear with options to automate your template.

You can choose from two categories:

1. Detect automation

When detecting placeholders, you can select 'Transformation detection' to convert upper-case placeholders. For instance, a placeholder called [NAME OF EMPLOYEE] could be detected using this option and be converted. Additionally, the 'E-signature tag detection' detects tags from DocuSign and other e-signature platforms.

Tick 'Advanced placeholder detection' to find placeholders outside square brackets with our new AI integration. The platform can recognise placeholders even if square brackets are missing, ensuring all placeholders are detected and allowing you to convert transaction documents into templates. Please note the AI feature needs to be enabled specifically for your organisation, contact Avvoka’s customer success team to learn more about this.

a. From a precedent template (square brackets followed by a footnote): As explained in the previous section, you can wrap your intended condition around square brackets with a footnote at the end so the system can identify it as a condition. When applying Smart Automation, you can choose to preserve condition footnotes by ticking the checkbox in the Smart Automation pop-up window. This is optional, as footnotes serve as markers to help the system recognise conditions. Conditions will automatically be named (these names can be changed afterwards using the attribute store), and the footnote text will become the question. The default question type will be "Radio buttons" triggered with a “Yes” but this can be modified if desired.

b. From a precedent template (with Avvoka mark-up): You can use Avvoka mark up with curly brackets and superscript text for more advanced conditional logic. For more guidance about how to prepare your template, please check the section above.

Once done, hit 'Automate', the system will inform you of the number of placeholders/conditions identified within your template.

After applying Smart Automation you can test it in Live demo. You can review the automation applied with the help of the Attribute Store.

You can also mass generate documents from your automated template.

2. Template Management

To use it, click 'Combine documents' in the Smart Automation feature, then select the documents to merge. The system consolidates the documents, applying block and inline conditions to address differences. The conditions are tied to a question in the questionnaire and based on the user's input, it would dictate what wording drops in or out of the generated document.

Worked example of template consolidation:

In the example below, two documents have been selected for template consolidation, one of them is a lease agreement for part of a building and the other one is for a whole building. Now, using the template management feature, we can consolidate these two documents into one.

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Once the documents have been consolidated into one, the differences are highlighted through block or in-line conditions. For instance, in the example below, there is an in-line condition over ’PART OF A BUILDING’ and another in-line condition on ’WHOLE’ for differentiating between two different documents.

The conditions are tied to a question in the questionnaire and the relevant text would populate in the document based on the user’s input. The system automatically detects the differences between the documents and groups them in “variants”.

Once the templates have been merged, you can then rename your attributes in the attribute store for your conditions. In the example shown previously relating to the lease, the question could be renamed to ‘Type of lease’, with one variant called ‘Part of a building’ and the other variant called ‘Whole building’.