Smarter Drafter Virtual Assistant: a VA who runs your intake forms and first drafts

You bought Smarter Drafter to stop a solicitor retyping the same will, the same shareholders agreement, the same employment contract, one field at a time. And it delivered the automation: decision-tree questionnaires that interview the client for you, precedents that assemble themselves from the answers, e-signature at the end of the line. More than 1,500 Australian lawyers use it, and it has always been strongest exactly where you probably sit: sole practitioners and boutique firms without a document clerk to spare. (It is now part of Tensis, if the new name on the invoice threw you. Same tool.)

Here is what the demo never quite says. Automation compresses the drafting; it does not remove the operating. Someone still chooses which questionnaire matches the matter and sends it. Someone notices the client who abandoned the form at the trust structure question on Tuesday. Someone deals with the address that would not validate, presses generate, routes the signature, chases the second director who never signs anything, and files the executed copy where the firm will find it in two years. In a boutique firm that someone is a principal, at 9pm, operating a tool that was supposed to buy the evening back.

That operating layer is the placement. Not a paralegal, not a drafter: a VA who runs the pipeline from matter opened to executed document filed, on Australian hours, while the legal content never leaves the lawyer’s hands.

The daily rhythm a VA runs in your Smarter Drafter

The day starts at the top of the funnel. Any matter opened since yesterday gets its questionnaire: the VA picks the smart form that matches the engagement, drops the client’s details in, tailors the covering email so it reads like your firm rather than a robot, and sends the link. Where the Smokeball integration is connected this is quicker again, because the client and matter contacts flow straight into the form and nobody keys a name twice. The dispatch gets logged, which sounds bureaucratic until the day a client insists they never received anything and the record settles it in ten seconds.

Then the middle of the funnel, which is where firms without a VA quietly lose the value of the tool. A decision-tree questionnaire is only as useful as its completion rate, and clients stall for human reasons: the question needed a document they had to dig out, the form arrived the week of settlement, they simply forgot. Your VA keeps a running view of every form out in the wild, complete, part-done or untouched, and works the stalls on a cadence you have approved: a friendly nudge at day two, a phone call at day five, an escalation to you when a client has gone properly quiet. The difference between a firm that loves Smarter Drafter and one that let the subscription lapse is almost always this chasing, done every day by someone whose job it is.

Validation triage sits alongside. Smarter Drafter checks addresses against Google Maps and ABNs against the Australian Business Register while the client types, which kills most transposition errors at the source. The stragglers still need a human: the company that traded under a name that does not match its ABR record, the rural property Google Maps mangles, the client who ignored the red flag and pushed on. The VA rings or emails, gets the corrected detail, and updates the response, so the data going into generation has been checked twice before a lawyer ever sees the draft.

Then generation itself. Once a questionnaire is complete the VA runs the build, gives the output a mechanical once-over, did every schedule populate, did the conditional clauses fire the way the answers say they should, and queues the first draft for the practitioner with the completed questionnaire alongside it. That pairing matters: reviewing a generated document against the client’s own structured answers is a far faster settle than reviewing one against a memory of a phone call.

The back half of the funnel is signatures and filing. Settled documents go out through the e-signature workflow; the VA sends the requests, watches who has and has not executed, re-issues links that expired, and chases the slow party without you having to think about it. Executed documents then get filed home. On Smokeball, the finished document saves back to the matter through the native integration and the VA verifies it landed; on LEAP-adjacent setups the VA does the save-back manually, named to your convention, into the right matter, every time. An executed deed sitting in a downloads folder is a small thing right up until it is a very large thing.

Around the pipeline sits the housekeeping that keeps it honest: Smokeball contacts deduplicated so the forms draw on clean data, the firm’s register of live questionnaires kept current, and a note to the precedent owner, with examples attached, when a template keeps producing a clause that makes practitioners frown. The VA also documents the whole workflow as they run it, which most firms have never written down; that SOP layer is what makes the process survive a holiday.

The honest bit

Three things worth pricing in before you book a call.

First, Smarter Drafter generates from your precedents, and it is ruthlessly faithful to them. If a template is stale, the automation produces stale documents faster than you used to produce them by hand. A VA will spot the recurring oddity and flag it, but fixing a precedent is legal work for the lawyer who owns it, and we will not dress a VA up as your precedent counsel. If your build needs surgery, that is a project with your practitioners (or Smarter Drafter’s own team), and the VA’s value arrives after it.

Second, the candidate pool with prior Smarter Drafter experience is thin. It is a specialist Australian legal tool, not Xero, and any agency claiming a bench of seasoned Smarter Drafter VAs is telling you what you want to hear. What we can say honestly: because the legal logic lives in the questionnaires rather than in the operator, it is among the quickest tools to bring a careful VA up on, and legal-admin VAs who know Smokeball take to it fast. The supervised week exists precisely for this.

Third, the automation covers the documents it covers. Matters that fall outside your questionnaire library still get drafted the old way, and Smarter Drafter does not run your trust ledger, your court diary or your billing; those live in your practice management system. A VA placement scoped only to Smarter Drafter rarely fills 10 hours a week on its own, which is why most firms run it as one lane of a broader legal-admin role covering intake and onboarding email, matter hygiene and billing prep.

What stays with you

This is legal work product, so the line gets drawn in ink.

Legal advice stays with the admitted practitioner, in every form. The VA never advises a client on how to answer a questionnaire question beyond mechanics (where to find their ABN, how to re-open the link); a question about what the client should choose is an advice request, and it escalates to you under a written rule rather than being answered helpfully and wrongly.

Document review and settling stay with you. Every generated document is a first draft until a lawyer has read it and decided it can go. The VA runs the machinery and the routing; the judgement about whether the output is right for this client, this structure, this risk, is never theirs, and the decision to release a document for signing is yours on every single matter.

Precedent content stays with the lawyer who owns it, undertakings and certifications stay inside the firm, and trust money never enters the picture at all, because Smarter Drafter does not touch it: anything trust-related lives in your practice management system under your existing authorisation controls, with the people your regulator has approved.

None of this hollows out the role. It defines it. The whole point of a document automation tool is that the operating and the lawyering separate cleanly, and a VA is how you staff the operating half without a single hour of it landing on a practising certificate.

What it costs and where to start

Running Smarter Drafter sits on our admin tier at $12-17 AUD an hour excl GST. Most boutique firms fold it into a 10-15 hour a week legal-admin placement, which comes out around $500-1,100 a month, with the intake pipeline as one lane alongside matter and billing admin. Placement takes 7-10 business days, the VA spends 5-7 days supervised inside your account before working solo, the refundable $500 deposit credits against your first month, the first 30 days carry a recalibrate-or-replace guarantee, and leaving takes 14 days notice, nothing more.

For the wider picture of what a VA covers across a practice, read the law firms page; if your Smarter Drafter library leans conveyancing, the conveyancers page is the better fit. The VA cost guide sets the rates against the true on-cost of a local hire. Or skip ahead and book a discovery call: Jenn takes every one herself and has placed 87+ VAs into Australian businesses since 2024. Come with your questionnaire completion rate, if you know it. If you do not know it, that is the answer too.