Signature blocks, formatted to your firm's standard — automatically
Docxedo now reformats attestation sections in one click, the same way it handles cover pages.
If you've ever opened a draft from a junior lawyer or an external party and found the signature blocks look nothing like your firm's house style — wrong fonts, witness lines that float around the page, director attestations split across two pages, parentheses where they shouldn't be — you'll know how much time goes into fixing it before the document goes out.
Docxedo now does it for you.
Why signature blocks matter more than they look
Under the Property Law Act 2007, the structure of a witness block is a legal requirement. A witness has to give their full name, their occupation, and the locality where they reside. A sole director signing a deed must have their signature witnessed. The signatory's printed name needs to be clearly associated with the signature, and the capacity in which they're signing (director, attorney, party) needs to be unambiguous.
When formatting goes wrong, those structural elements can get lost. A signature block that splits across a page break, a witness line that's been deleted because someone thought it was decorative, a director's name that's drifted away from their signature are the kind of thing that can become an issue if a document is ever challenged.
So when we built signature block reformatting into Docxedo, the goal wasn't to make attestations look pretty. It was to apply your firm's standard treatment consistently while preserving every structural element the law requires.
What the feature does
Docxedo detects attestation sections in a Word document and replaces them with your firm's branded version, the same complete-swap behaviour we already use for cover pages. The names, roles, witness details and capacity lines are preserved. The formatting around them is rebuilt from your template.
It handles the patterns lawyers actually use day-to-day:
- Single party with a witness
- Single entity signed by two directors
- Single entity signed by one director with a witness
- Standard and company document styles
- Attestation blocks inside tables or in body text
- Documents with multiple signature blocks where each party needs its own
It also keeps each signature block intact on a single page rather than letting it split awkwardly across page breaks, which sounds minor until you've had to chase a signed deed back to a client because the witness line ended up orphaned at the top of page seven.
Who benefits
Practice managers who own document standards and spend time policing them across the firm. Lawyers who inherit drafts from other parties and have to bring them into house style before a deed gets signed. Anyone who's ever copy-pasted a signature block from an old precedent and then spent ten minutes nudging the formatting back into line.
If your firm has a defined template for how attestations should look, Docxedo applies it, consistently, in seconds rather than minutes per document.
Docxedo applies your law firm's branding and style guidelines to Word documents in one click. Built for NZ and AU law firms.