Can you become your own lawyer? - legal self-help books and software programs on the market - includes related article listing legal self-help software and books - Buyers Guide

Home Office Computing, March, 1992 by Deborah L. Jacobs

Robert Burgess learned about contracts the hard way. After trying for months to collect $1,300 from a delinquent client, Burgess, who runs a bookkeeping service in Knoxville, Tennessee, went to see a lawyer. "You should have had something in writing," the lawyer counseled. That legal advice cost Burgess $85.

In the months since then, Burgess ultimately collected from his client, but only after taking him to small-claims court. And before doing any work for future customers, he has insisted on having a signed agreement ahead of time.

To implement his new policy, Burgess relies on It's Legal from Parsons Technology, one of a growing number of legal selfhelp software packages that enable small-business owners to understand the law and draft at least some legal documents themselves. This type of software is not a total substitute for competent legal help, but it can cut down on attorneys' fees for many common legal tasks and provide answers more quickly than a real-life lawyer.

WHAT'S OUT THERE?

In assembling this buyer's guide, I reviewed nine software packages for IBM-compatible and Macintosh computers, and an assortment of books as well. Five of the packages let you choose from a variety of common legal documents, one is devoted to the complex task of forming a corporation, and three deal exclusively with wills.

The software packages come in two basic formats. Interactive programs--such as Home Lawyer from MECA Software, Personal Law Firm by Bloc Publishing, and the aforementioned It's Legal--step you through a series of on-screen questions and then prepare a document that reflects your answers. While these interactive programs are highly structured and sometimes inflexible, their hand-holding style generally makes them the easiest to use.

The other format--represented by Legal LetterWorks from Round Lake Publishing and The DEsktop Lawyer from The Open University--is not truly software but simply disks filled with files of legal-form templates that you tailor with a word processor. To complete the forms, you delete the blank lines and fill in the pertinent information. With a lease, say, it would be the names of the parties, term of the lease, and description of the premises, among other items. The big advantage here is that you can freely edit any document, adding and deleting clauses, importing material from other documents, and perhaps personalizing it--you could insert the names of the parties throughout the agreement, say, rather than just referring to them as "company" and "consultant."

The competing goals of providing flexibility while maintaining the quality of the legal document create a perennial conflict in legal self-help products. While the interactive programs tend to limit your choices, they also prevent you from making changes that might get you into legal trouble. Template-style packages that work with word processors offer greater flexibility but introduce additional risk of errors. For instance, in the course of filling in the blanks, you might add or delete words that could radically change the meaning of a document.

Another downside to template packages, compared with the interactive variety, is that you get no on-line help in completing documents. The manual to Legal LetterWorks makes up for that in part, with a code number in the middle of each blank space corresponding to an annotation in the book's margin about how to supply the information called for.

WHAT TO BUY?

Choosing the right package depends on your specific legal needs, the amount of instruction you require, and the time you're willing to devote to whatever do-it-yourself project you undertake. I appraised the packages with an eye toward their instructiveness (through on-screen help, an accompanying manual, or both), ease of use, and the quality of the final product.

Certain pitfalls go with the territory. One pitfall, which the products meet with differing degrees of success, is addressing the concerns of both parties to the agreement, whether they are landlord and tenant, buyer and seller, or employer and employee. Another is reflecting differences in state laws such as rules on tenants' security deposits and requirements for registering a power of attorney. Where state laws vary (most products flag those instances for you), you'd be well advised to have a lawyer review the document.

Like practicing attorneys, self-help products vary widely in their attention to detail and their anticipation of business owners' needs. But the standards applied here should give you some idea of what to look for when shopping for help in creating legally valid documents. So I've put together cross-comparisons among the varying products to give you an overview of how they stack up to each other. Each reviewed product cannot create each common business document, but nine documents are covered here:

* Consulting agreements

* Employment contracts

* Leases

* Collection-demand letters

* Bills of sale

* Releases