The Assembly Line process

The guidance below is for organizations that want to set up their own copy of the Assembly Line, not for individual automators.

We think that the most important work we did came not from computer code, but a process: the process of automating a legal form, broken down into a series of small steps.

Our Trello boards

We turned that process into a series of Kanban boards, and if you want you can jump straight to copying and customizing them for your needs:

1. AssemblyLine - Pre-processing Template Board
2. AssemblyLine - Development Template Board
3. AssemblyLine - Testing Template Board

Overview

Automating a form involves:

• Research and vetting the substantive content
• Coding
• Adding labeled fields to a template document
• Generating and refining a prototype
• Testing and getting feedback

More reading

• Building your first expert system
• Lauritsen and Soudakoff, Keys to a Successful Document Assembly Project