Docuble is a UK-based company that was founded in 2009 by former managing director Sarah Hanfrey. Hanfrey as well as director Tim Suiter and their small team are joining DocsCorp – Hanfrey will continue to lead the development of StyleDocs and Suiter joins as product manager.
DocsCorp has acquired Docuble (previously Word Exchange), which enables law firms to easily fix styling problems in Microsoft Word, including achieving consistent house style and sorting out those often hugely irritating issues with numbering. Docuble also brings with it print management software docublePrint. The products have been renamed styleDocs and printDocs.
To date the company’s reach has been limited to the UK but speaking to Legal IT Insider, DocsCorp CEO and co-founder Dean Sappey said: “We are able to get this to our customers across the world, which Docuble don’t have the resources to do.” He added: “Tim and Sarah and their team are doing the same jobs but we have sales and marketing support so they can focus on the product.”
According to Sappey, DocsCorp looked at a few document restyling options but says: “This was by far and away the best product. We started showing it to customers in December and two customers have already bought it and a bunch of very large law firms are interested.”
He says: “It fixes the styling problems in Word: if you want to change the template to match your house style, or there is an error in the numbering, it fixes it in one click. The geeky people love it but so does your average lawyer, who can’t get numbering to work and just wants something that fixes it without having to know why – that’s what people want software to do.”
Word Exchange rebranded as Docuble in March 2020 and Sappey tells us: “From all the knowledge they had they completely rewrote the styling product. You learn a lot from the first version and sometimes you get to the point where you have to start from scratch. They were able to do that because the tech has changed.”
He adds: “Whenever we look at product, we try to find new, fast tech rather than software that has been round years. We want something new and modern, so we’re not stuck with legacy tech.”
This follows the acquisition of document production vendor Verowave, which at first glance appears to overlap with Docuble but Sappey says: “Verowave is about creating a document from scratch and personalising the detail and language from a standard library. Docuble is where you might have received a document from a client and need to reformat it, or you have an old document that needs to be restyled. The two work together and there is very little overlap; they do different things at different parts of the document lifecycle.” The add-ons all live in the Word toolbar.
The addition of Docuble means the DocsCorp document productivity platform now delivers template management, document assembly, document styling and repair, numbering, document comparison, PDF editing, metadata cleaning, email recipient checking, print management, document bundling, and bulk OCR processing.
Docuble will be available as a separate product to customers, who will be able to add it to their enterprise deal, added into the Word tool bar.