Internet Newsletter for Lawyers |
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Since the early 1990s electronic forms have been a staple purchase for many firms. The introduction of laser printers and WYSIWYG word processors (What You See Is What You Get) and forms design applications enabled suppliers readily to create and distribute their own proprietary electronic versions of law forms which could be filled in on-screen, printed out and submitted to the appropriate authority. Additional features are also now included, such as automatic calculations and computations and the completion of address details from standard databases. In most cases forms can also be integrated with case management systems.
The advent of the web has radically changed the landscape, with many forms now freely available from Government Departments and agencies and other sources, the development of other innovative commercial online forms services and the ongoing move to e-Government.
In its 1999 White Paper The Future Management of Crown Copyright the Government explicitly acknowledged that "it is in the Government's interest to make forms, both statutory and non-statutory, available as widely as possible. It is therefore our intention to feature an increasing range of government forms on departmental Web sites in many cases enabling users to complete forms on screen.”
This duly came to pass, so that now most law forms required in daily practice can be obtained for free from official websites, including the Bank of England, the Charity Commission, the Commission for Racial Equality, Companies House, the Court Service, the Criminal Defence Service, the Disability Rights Commission, the Employment Appeal Tribunal, the Employment Tribunals, the Equal Opportunities Commission, HM Customs & Excise, HM Land Registry, the Inland Revenue, the Insolvency Service, Land Registers of Northern Ireland, the Legal Services Commission, the Patent Office, the Planning Inspectorate, the Public Guardianship Office, Registers of Scotland, the Scottish Court Service and the Takeover Panel.
All these forms can also be accessed through infolaw Lawfinder service - see the end of this article.
When you access a pdf form on the web, you can either launch Acrobat to view the form or save it to disk for later viewing. pdf forms may be presented simply as images, in which case you can print copies but must then fill them in by hand; or they may be fillable, in which case you can fill in and print the filled form. Fillable forms may be programmed with some degree of intelligence (eg to calculate totals and perform other computations). The free Acrobat reader will not allow you to save a filled form - for that you need either Acrobat Approval ($39 from Adobe) or the full version of Acrobat ($249). With the full version you can also create, edit and add features to pdf files.
Some official sites publish forms as Microsoft Word documents. These can generally also be used by WordPerfect users, though a precise conversion of the form cannot be guaranteed.
Exceptionally, the Legal Services Commission do not publish their claims etc forms online themselves: they are available through a joint venture between The Law Society and Capsoft UK in HotDocs format. This requires that you use the HotDocs player which you can download free when you register at www.lawsociety.hotdocs.co.uk. Note - later addition...As of April 2003, the Legal Services Commission now publish all their Community Legal Service forms in pdf on their own site here. Previously these were only available in HotDocs format from the Law Society HotDocs site or offline from various franchised suppliers.
The commercial service which really set the cat amongst the pigeons, attempting to displace the established forms suppliers by offering free forms on the web, is Everyform, at www.everyform.net, which publishes a full range of law forms in HotDocs format. Everyform was last year purchased by Lexis-Nexis Butterworths (who own the rights to HotDocs). The basic Everyform service is free. Forms are not accessed directly on the web but must be downloaded in packs and the forms expire after a week “to prevent outdated forms remaining in circulation”. In reality, this is designed to push you towards the chargeable update services which offer lower levels of inconvenience!
Although the OyezForms is an off-line service, Oyez have also introduced a service called Oyez FormsLink (www.oyezformslink.co.uk) which allows you to order from their entire catalogue of paper forms online, and complete and print the most popular forms direct from the web with Adobe Acrobat. pdf forms are charged at around £4 each. The number of forms available in pdf is quite limited, though Oyez promise to produce more.
The law publishers all incorporate forms in specific CD publications, eg the various Civil Courts services, and some of these are also accessible via the web. Other specialist publishers feature forms as part of their web subscription services, eg EGi Forms and Precedents.
In other cases free forms are offered as a come-on to purchase related services. For example, Jordans Forms on the Web provides over 100 company and LLP forms for free. While these are, of course, the same forms you can access on the Companies House website, Jordans' service enables you first to access company details by company name or registration number and then drops these details into the form, ready for you to complete the remaining information. The calculation is that using these forms will drive you towards their various registration and search services. See www.jordansonline.co.uk/forms/jform.exe.
Thus far we have been concerned with services which enable you to produce printable versions of forms using the web and appropriate software installed locally on your computer. However, the internet is increasingly being used by Government to offer services which enable you to submit the required information direct to the authority concerned without the need to fill in a paper form at all.
You can enroll for and access a number of such Government services through the “Government Gateway” at www.gateway.gov.uk, using a single account login. Further transactions will be added “until almost all the paperwork that you currently send off to Government departments will be available online”.
Two of the more popular services accessible via the Government Gateway are:
The land registries also offer services enabling the electronic submission of (and access to) data:
The Court Service Money Claim Online is another prime example (www.courtservice.gov.uk/mcol). Since its launch in February 2002, over 16,700 claims have been issued using MCOL. Phase 2 of the project is now enabling respondents to submit an acknowledgment of service, defence, part admission and counterclaim.
There is no reason why in due course all the information you currently submit on paper forms should not be incorporated into similar services. The Government is in principle committed to this: one of the three core objectives of the Office of the e-Envoy (www.e-envoy.gov.uk) is “to make all government services available electronically by 2005 with key services achieving high levels of use “.
Nick Holmes is an electronic publishing consultant and Managing Director of Information for Lawyers Limited (infolaw). The infolaw website at www.infolaw.co.uk provides access to over 70,000 online UK legal documents, including over 1,250 law forms. Nick can be contacted by email at nickholmes@infolaw.co.uk.
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