What is now HotDocs Corporation began as a research project in the mid-1970s at Brigham Young University Law School. Funded at the time by West Publishing, the project began as a code base, developed for the VAX mainframe computer running the VMS operating system. In the late 1980s, the project became commercial with the founding of Capsoft Development by Marshall Morrise. Capsoft Development licensed the technology from BYU and ported the code base into DOS. A few years later, the technology was re-birthed as HotDocs, a Windows-based version that reflected many of the original feature sets from the old VAX version.