That disables automatic configuration of log4j by docx4j.
If automatic configuration is happening, you'd see:
"Since your log4j configuration (if any) was not found, docx4j has configured log4j automatically."
Docx4jProperties.getProperties().. will only work if you do it early enough (ie before Context class is loaded). A better approach is to put docx4j.properties on your classpath. Its contents may be found at https://github.com/plutext/docx4j/tree/ ... /resources
If you don't see the auto config message, you are seeing logs because there is a log4j configuration somewhere else in your application. You need to find that and modify it.