November 2005

Russell Shepherd of Capform has asked me to correct an error in the previous post, repeated from the Media Guardian article, saying that:

We have no intention of introducing charges for our current free forms service on Capform. Capform will introduce new chargeable services next year – but this will not affect the provision of free forms as any charges will relate to new services and products.

Further, he says that he thinks that the value of the site is precisely the same as Everyform – in that it provides a free and useful resource for all governement forms, in the easy to use Hodocs format. He acknowledges that obtaining the forms direct from the government agencies is a viable and sensible way for busy lawyers to get their forms “provided you want to spend what can seem like most of your life navigating the web to find them”. While it is true the forms are distributed across many sites, I find it hard to believe that nowadays, for example, a conveyancer could not easily bookmark the Land Registry forms page; a litigator, HM Courts Services forms page; and so on. More on this anon.

But – as ever (in agreement here) – the market will decide.

Serial entrepreneur Russell Shepherd has launched Capform, which provides a free library of over 1,000 government forms in HotDocs format for download from the web. The business is essentially the same as Everyform, which he originally set up in 1999 and sold to what is now LexisNexis Butterworths in 2001 for an undisclosed 7-figure sum.

The move is in response to the withdrawal by LexisNexis in May this year of the free Everyform service. Media Guardian reports Shepherd as surprised at this example of an old media business failing to understand the dynamics of the internet, saying: “Surely the whole point of the internet is to generate lots and lots of traffic and then to develop innovative ways of generating revenues.”

The Everyform venture was clearly shrewdly calculated. LexisNexis had acquired Capsoft Development, the developer and original owner of HotDocs in 1998; but Shepherd had retained the UK and Asia Pacific HotDocs distribution rights he had earlier acquired (as Capsoft UK Ltd) from Capsoft Development, so he was uniquely placed to turn the trick.

But the law forms landscape has changed considerably in the intervening 6 years. Public provision was patchy and inadequate in 1999, while now almost all the forms offered by Capform and many more besides are already published on the web by the government departments and agencies as fillable Adobe pdf forms.

So if the forms are free from government anyway, why choose HotDocs forms from Capform? Although HotDocs has undoubted merits, for the vast majority of web users, viewing pdfs with Adobe’s free Reader is a norm. And for most forms a fillable pdf is quite adequate. Further, many forms-based transactions with government are being superseded by online e-government services.

As to how Shepherd intends to make a buck this time, we can only speculate, but it’s plainly stated in the Media Guardian article that “next year he hopes to introduce charges”.