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Legal Research

: Oregon Legal Research

Oregon Legal Forms: the pyramid

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The most frequently asked question, especially from non-attorneys, in public law libraries is,

?do you have a form called x (or that will do y)??

The law library response depends on the form, the relative sophistication and experience of the person asking the question, the issue (substantive or procedural),

and the jurisdiction.

Some states have lots of standardized, court-authorized, forms.

Others, including Oregon, do not, though we do have some

(see for example in family law matters).

Public law library staff seldom hand over forms to non-attorneys,

without accompanying the handover with a strong recommendation to consult an attorney, warnings about filing documents that may not be correct, and in every possible way stressing the importance of making sure the library patron has the right form for the specific purpose

AND

knows what to do with it.

However, the process of searching for a form is fairly uniform from state to state,

starting from sources close in and reaching outward as needed.

As much as I dislike pyramid schemes (of the dietary or of the financial sort),

the pyramid is a useful visual device for describing the body of research sources that one uses to search for forms.

So, here we go ...

Is
there a:

1) local court sanctioned form?
2) statewide (standard) court sanctioned form?
3) sample form in a state-specific legal practice book?
4) sample form in a current legal education course book?
5) attorneys only: does attorney colleague have a sample form?
6) sample (fill in blank) form at a jurisdiction-specific legal stationer?s store?
7) sample form in a subject-specific or procedure-specific forms book or treatise?
8) sample form in legal forms compilation (print or online)?

One source of forms I left out of this pyramid includes

those databases of online legal forms that some legal publishers make available

to public libraries

and those zillions of ?I found it online? forms people seem so willing to believe will solve their problems.

These databases make me really nervous.

Actual, often imperfectly unredacted, forms

are frequently used as samples in these databases.

As squeamish as that makes me, I have to breathe even more deeply through the problem of non-attorneys using these forms without consulting an attorney or otherwise getting professional advice before completing and filing the form.

IF ONLY:

I see too many lawyers and judges coming through my law library

who also have to breathe deeply through expensive, and often very sad, cases

where the attorneys have to fix what someone tried to do themselves, with online sample forms or online attorneys.

I work with a terrific group of attorneys and judges who, along with me, also say, ?if only they had consulted (or listened) to me from the start.?

Full post as published by Oregon Legal Research on July 03, 2008 (boomark / email).