Docassemble FAQs

Docassemble is a free and open-source platform for building interactive online applications. It’s used a lot in the legal community, but anyone can use it. It acts like an interactive guide or wizard to walk your staff or client through a questionnaire and can deliver advice and documents, or connect the results to a database. Like TurboTax, Docassemble can be used to create similar applications. It works on a phone, a desktop, or even by interactive email or SMS text messaging.

No. Docassemble was written by Jonathan Pyle. 

Docassemble is used all over the world by a growing community that includes legal aid, small law firms, big law firms, and in-house at corporations that have nothing to do with the legal industry.

Yes, but make sure you understand how! Docassemble itself is completely free. You will never pay a license fee to use it. That means you can have unlimited users (and developers) at the same cost. But Docassemble on its own won’t help you. You need someone to use it to automate your forms, just as is true with HotDocs, ContractXPress, A2J Author, and every other document automation tool.

Sometimes you want a user-friendly, step-by-step interview, and sometimes you just want something a little more advanced than cut and paste. Docassemble can be the “glue” between your case management system (like Salesforce, Legal Server, Clio, Practice Panther, Office 365, or Google Suite) and a library of forms. If your staff is repeatedly filling out the same forms over and over again, this kind of automation can pay off.

There are a few drag-and-drop platforms aimed at automating documents out there. Some even use Docassemble as their base.