If you are willing to devote a little time for research and you are confident of your own capabilities, then it may not be necessary for you to consult a lawyer every time you want to have some legal documents prepared.
A host of websites offer inexpensive, or in some cases free, preparation of many legal documents for everything ranging from wills and estate planning, to divorces and name changes, to setting up and incorporating a business.
Some sites offer very detailed text or sometimes even videos to guide you in choosing your required services. Once you create an account, you can answer a series of questions and the site will generate a custom document for you. There are sites which offer the simple forms for free while other sites allow you to download files for reference in making forms yourself.
These sites may be appropriate if you have fairly simple circumstances to deal with and straightforward answers to the questions, but there are many issues that will still be left in your hands.
If you create the legal document you need, do you know what to do with it? This information may also be found on the website initially, but it is very likely that applicable regulations or processes vary from state to state or sometimes even per locality. A lawyer would be quite adept at handling those peculiarities for you, make sure that the appropriate paperwork are properly filed, and perhaps even provide safe storage for some documents like wills, which don’t have to come out until years after, when its owner already passed away.
When your answers are less than straightforward you may hit a snag. For example, in a second marriage you may want to leave your home to your children, but allow your spouse to live there until he or she dies. Online forms may not be able to cover lifetime estate.
The less likely that issues may be handled online once it gets increasingly complicated. If such is the case, you are going to need an actual lawyer who will continue to ask the necessary questions until such time that you get the desired answers. The good thing though is that most of these forms don’t ask for payment unless you have completed them. So you may cancel halfway through, when it is already apparent that it would be insufficient to provide the results you were looking for. Don’t worry about the supposedly wasted time you have spent trying to do the thing on your own, at least it prepared you better for the actual call to the attorney’s office.
Another pleasant surprise may be that the visit to the attorney’s office may not be as expensive as you think. When evaluating your options, contact the attorney’s office first to know their rates for a particular service that you are looking for. If the costs are comparable, you may choose a face-to-face interchange and someone else to handle the paperwork over the impersonal forms on the Internet and the challenge of filing everything yourself.
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