Published in the Internet Newsletter for Lawyers, March 2003
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.
Official versions
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.
Formats
By far the majority of forms are published in pdf – Adobe Corporation’s portable document format, a viewable version of Adobe’s PostScript print file format. To view and print pdf forms you require the Adobe Acrobat reader. This can be downloaded (free) from Adobe at www.adobe.com.
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.
Commercial services
Despite the availability of free forms from official sources, the principal commercial electronic forms services continue to flourish. The services from established suppliers such as Laserform at www.laserform.co.uk, Oyez at www.oyez.co.uk and Shaws at www.shaws.co.uk provide comprehensive ranges of forms with the features already mentioned. However, these are not currently offered as online services, though the internet is used for the provision of maintenance and support services.
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 at 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.
E-government and e-justice
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:
- HM Customs and Excise Electronic VAT Return www.hmce.gov.uk/business/electronic/evr.htm
- The Inland Revenue internet services for Self Assessment and Corporation Tax https://www.ir-portal.gov.uk/index.jsp
The land registries also offer services enabling the electronic submission of (and access to) data:
- HM Land Registry Land Registry Direct at www.landregistrydirect.gov.uk. Note, however that though this uses web browser technology it is not accessible through the internet or security reasons.
- Registers of Scotland eForms Online www.ros.gov.uk/eforms-online.
- Land Registers of Northern Ireland Landweb Direct at www.lrni.gov.uk/static/home.shtml.
The Court Service Money Claim Online is another prime example at 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 at www.e-envoy.gov.uk is “to make all government services available electronically by 2005 with key services achieving high levels of use “.
infolaw forms services
[updated]
infolaw FormsPlus is a range of fillable law forms produced in Word, providing a more user-friendly and felxible solution than the official or other commercial services.
