Free Legal Forms Online

Adams Drafting, a blawg of interest primarily to business attorneys, has an interesting post and following discussion regarding the use, misuse, and dangers of free legal forms found on the Internet or elsewhere: With Free Online Forms, You Get What You Pay For. Excerpts:

The problem isn’t a shortage of free legal forms online. Instead, it’s that there’s available online for free a vast and ever-growing supply of contract models, most of them crappy, and separating what’s OK, in terms of language and substance, from what’s not OK is a gruesome task....


I see the problem as being not that the documents are inherently incorrect in themselves - I’m sure the good sites produce very sound documents - but that they are drafted in the abstract. If a person pulls a document from any standard database - whether one of these sites or their own firm’s standards - it will be blind luck if it actually works for the agreement they are trying to draft for without amendment. Then there seem to be three options:

(i) The document as just used as-is - the document is unlikely to fit the deal.
(ii) A non-lawyer makes some changes. The problem here is the risk of unintended legal consequences of a change.
(iii) A lawyer reviews it. Clearly the issue here is cost.

I suppose people just need to balance those factors, but for any deal worth anything significant, it is likely to be worth having a lawyer have a look, at which point it is more cost-effective for them to use their own standards.

See also Factual Error Found On the Internet, The Onion, 2002.

Same-Sex Marriage in California; Domestic Partnerships

As a result of the California Supreme Court's recent ruling that prohibiting gay marriage violates the California Constitution, many Golden State gay couples, who had previously registered at the state level as domestic partners, are wondering whether to dissolve their domestic partnership, before or following their gay marriage? This recent San Francisco Chronicle article sheds some light on the topic, and reports that state legislature attorneys advise that the domestic partnership need not be dissolved, prior to such any such marriage:

Same-sex couples who are registered as domestic partners do not have to dissolve that union before getting married, attorneys that advise the state Legislature said Thursday, just as county clerks and other local officials met to determine how they will enact last week's historic state Supreme Court ruling.

Given the possibility (perhaps even the likelihood, given the decisive ballot-box victory of the California Defense of Marriage Act in 2000) that California voters will turn out at polling places and amend the state constitution to prohibit gay marriage this November by passing Proposition 8, it is in fact probably advisable, though of course legally untested at this point, for gay couples to maintain domestic partner registration following and during their marriage, which would presumably remain in effect, following and despite any termination of their legal marriages due to a change in the law.

New 2008 California Notary Block

Effective today, January 1, 2008, all legal documents to be notarized in California must use the following notary block:

State of California
County of ___________

On ______________________ before me, (here insert name and title of the officer), personally appeared __________________ who proved to me on the basis of satisfactory evidence to be the person(s) whose name(s) is/are subscribed to the within instrument and acknowledged to me that he/she/they executed the same in his/her/their authorized capacity(ies), and that by his/her/their signature(s) on the instrument the person(s), or the entity upon behalf of which the person(s) acted, executed the instrument.

I certify under PENALTY OF PERJURY under the laws of the State of California that the foregoing paragraph is true and correct.

WITNESS my hand and official seal.

Signature ____________________________ (Seal)

Reference: California Civil Code Section 1189
California notary block PDF format; California Secretary of State

California power of attorneys also now require a thumb print upon execution.