Business Integrity Granted Twelfth Patent

Global News

21
Jan
2015

Editor

“Script Generation” further describes approach to building dynamic questionnaire forms

Business Integrity®, the world leader in legal document automation solutions for law firms and corporations, announces it has been granted its twelfth patent.

Patent number 8,788,929 was granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office protecting the company’s newest invention related to the field of script generation for use in software applications. 

ContractExpress® is about more than just assembling Microsoft Word documents. In advanced document assembly, the interview form, which collects data that goes into the generated document, has to match the structure of the template itself. For example, if the template is an English law agreement and one of the parties is a registered company, then the interview must collect the registered company number for that party. When developers have to manually code these forms, they must also manually define every one of these dependencies, which can lead to delays, errors, and an overall lack of trust in the system.  Patent ‘929’ is an integral part of ContractExpress’ solution to this critical challenge. 

The abstract of patent number is 8,788,929 is as follows:

Indirect update functions, for updating a form, are generated by supplying update functions to a synthesizer, and generating an activation network, based on these update functions. The invocation sequence of the activation network is then determined, and used to update elements of a form. The generation of the invocation sequence by the synthesizer removes the need for complex hand encoding of form structures, and provides a means by which the functions may be generated as part of a server, client or middleware application.

Andy Wishart, CTO, Business Integrity, Inc., commented on the abstract: 

In a complex template with heavy nested optional clauses and repetitions, the form dependency design can get very complex with a cascade of enabling and disabling of items based on prior answers. In ContractExpress we remove the need to manually create interview forms as ContractExpress automatically creates the associated forms from the source Microsoft Word template and handles the dependencies between questions on the form. This patent defines the mechanism we use for defining these dependencies and how this is translated into auto-generated script that controls this enabling/disabling behavior.

The world’s leading law firms and corporations rely on ContractExpress 5, ContractExpress for Salesforce and ContractExpress for SharePoint to reduce delays, cost and risk associated with document assembly and contract creation.