From FastDraft to RediDraft™

FastDraft started as a DOS application built on top of WordPerfect, storing document fragments as RTF that could be reassembled in any order, with variables completed and replaced as it went. Within months the founders' own firm could not work without it, which raised an obvious question: how many other firms had the same problem?

Interactive Professional Software was formed to sell FastDraft beyond the firm that built it, with Jan (Malone) DeSalvo as CEO. Under Jan, FastDraft learned to work with Microsoft Word as well as WordPerfect, gained a basic network version, and got its trademark. The customer base stopped being one law firm and started being an industry.

Tim Owensby joined as CTO. Jan knew where the software should go; Tim knew what it could be made to do. Between them the product moved into markets nobody had originally pictured for it, some of them a long way from a law office.

Interactive Professional Software was rebranded as Valeo Software, LLC, still under Jan DeSalvo's stewardship, and the company continued to thrive into the new decade.

The clearest example: FastDraft ran the automated voice capture system for a large medical examiner's office in California, transcribing and assembling reports in a setting where getting a document wrong had consequences. Fragments, variables, and conditional logic turned out to work just as well on an autopsy report as on a trust.

Valeo closed, and the source code and intellectual property went to Tim Owensby, along with a group of firms who still depended on the software and had nowhere else to go. FastDraft turned out to be built well enough that it needed exactly one significant fix to keep running on Windows XP. It kept working, quietly, for years.

By 2010 Windows XP was going away and the users who had stayed all along asked for a modern version. The FastDraft trademark had lapsed and been claimed by someone else, so Tim rewrote the application from the ground up and relaunched it as RediDraft™ in August 2010: a desktop client backed by a cloud repository, and a way forward for everyone moving to Windows 7.

RediDraft did what it was supposed to do and needed little attention. Minor updates ran through 2018, and firms kept drafting with it every working day for years after that, which is the most useful thing software can do. Plenty of users went right on calling it FastDraft, and some still do.

While the Enterprise Client served firms day to day, FasTrac™ Consulting LLC began work on something bigger: an entirely new document assembly engine, on an entirely new data model, free of any word processor. Rather than announce it, we used it. The new platform went into daily production inside FasTrac in 2024, and early-adopter customers soon put it to work on real documents, including sales-contract automation, an early demonstration that the new architecture reaches well beyond any single field or document type. Nearly two years of production use shaped what would become RediDraft™ One before the public ever saw it.

The original client-server RediDraft remains in daily use at firms across the country, and it isn't standing still. In August 2026, FasTrac releases RediDraft™ Classic : a major upgrade of the Enterprise Client featuring a modernized interface and a dramatically improved user experience. Classic connects to the same RediDraft Cloud repositories firms already rely on, so long-time users get a better way to work with the platform they trust: nothing to migrate, nothing to relearn. Classic is not a stepping-stone; it is a permanent member of the family, maintained for as long as firms are using it.

After nearly two years of daily production use and early-customer refinement, RediDraft™ One becomes generally available: one engine, three editions, one price for your whole firm, from a single desktop to a firm-wide web deployment. And true to a promise that dates back to FastDraft's earliest days, moving to One stays simple and easy: export your library from Classic, import it, and keep working. One arrived later than we first expected, and we've written down what the extra time bought .