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March 6, 2010

Simon Fodden

PolicyTool: Policy for the Masses

Lawyer, Slawyer, and newspaper columnist David Canton has teamed up with rtraction, an Ontario IT company, to produce PolicyTool. The notion is that businesses need policies in place to govern a variety of employee practices but can't always afford the services of a lawyer to devise them; PolicyTool invites you to answer a number of questions and feeds the answers into well-drafted "boilerplate," resulting in a "comprehensive and informed framework for your legal counsel to quickly create a binding policy." PolicyTool does the initial drafting; and a lawyer engaged by the user will tweak and approve.

At the moment the only area in which PolicyTool offers its service is in relation to the use of social media by employees. Other policy areas are under development.

The use of PolicyTool is currently free.

It's been getting a lot of coverage on Twitter and has been bookmarked a couple of hundred times on Declicious. Congratulations, David.

Simon Fodden is the founder of Slaw. He taught law at Osgoode Hall Law School for more than 30 years before he retired to focus on writing, publishing, and IT and law.
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2 Comments on “PolicyTool: Policy for the Masses”

  1. Skeptical says:
    March 8, 2010 at 8:53 am

    Call me a wet blanket, but I suspect that the sort of company that would use a computer to create its policies is the same sort of company that would skip the "needless expense" of having a lawyer review them.

    Still, better than no policies at all, I suppose.

  2. Technology Forum says:
    March 8, 2010 at 10:53 am

    This is a great idea – unless you are a law firm that bills by the hour. In other words unless you are a law firm.

    The examiners at the United States Patent and Trademark Office use similar software to prepare office actions. I've never seen it in action but I believe an examiner can select grounds for rejection from drop down menus. The relevant language, including canned legal arguments and citations to relevant cases, gets dropped into the document. It can then be tweaked where necessary.

    There is no reason why patent attorneys could not use the same type of software to prepare responses.

    Necessity is the mother of invention. The government wants labor saving devices to make workers more productive. Law firms bill by the hour and are primarily interested in improving the efficiency of things they can't bill such as secretarial work.

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