Where to Find Legal Documents Online?
Using legal document templates can significantly streamline legal workflow. Here's where to find them online and how to tell which ones are of good quality.
Drafting a legal document is both a standardized and a creative procedure that can be streamlined with the help of pre-made solutions. Legal professionals have a variety of example documents and templates at their disposal to make the writing process more efficient. Here are a few places to find legal documents online.
Why Look for Legal Documents Online?
Legal work is largely comprised of paperwork and handling various kinds of legal documents. The process of creating a document, for instance a contract or a legal letter, requires a lot of attention to ensure all details are correct and everything is compliant with relevant standards and rules.
This process undoubtedly consumes a considerable amount of time. The path from the first draft to the final file version includes hours of meticulous work. It often involves multiple versions of the same document, altered during reviews and negotiations. Often, reviews uncover that essential parts are left out by mistake or that other parts are not in accordance with relevant norms.
That is where a legal document template or even an example of a legal document of a specific type can help. Let’s see different ways in which these templates are useful.
Saving Time
Drafting a document from scratch is a lengthy process, but using a template can shorten it significantly. With well-structured pre-made templates, legal practitioners usually only need to make minor content modifications and fill in personal details, thus saving countless hours.
Easy Drafting
While creating a legal document requires expert knowledge about law and any field that the document touches upon, using a template allows even non-legal professionals to help with this task. A well-comprised template already contains all the typical elements of a document of a certain kind. This means that the person using it only needs to add case-specific details and give it to a legal professional for verification.
Reducing Errors
Within an overloaded team, mistakes are a common part of daily tasks. Sometimes, a document needs to be drafted or altered quickly. Sometimes, employees are unfocused or tired, and errors happen. These errors can be avoided by using a legal template. Such a template can minimize the risk of leaving out essential clauses or terms and overlooking typos that seem minor but can potentially lead to legal complications.
Compliance
A critical part of drafting is ensuring that a legal document is compliant with all relevant laws and regulations. It needs to be written using standard legal terminology for clarity and preciseness. Document templates are usually already compliant with those regulations, making it easier for legal professionals to finalize them.
Productivity
Reducing the time needed to create a document, review it, and ensure it’s compliant with regulating laws can help streamline the workflow. This frees up legal teams and allows them to spend their time, energy, and other resources on other tasks, improving their overall productivity.
Places to Find Legal Document Templates Online
Once you realize your job can be much easier with document templates, the next step is to find a good source. Let’s see what are some usual places that offer legal templates online, as well as some recommendations for lawyers from different countries.
- Template websites – websites that specialize at offering various templates for different kinds of legal documents.
- Online legal service websites – organisations that provide legal service exclusively online; this includes legal advice as well as resources for other legal professionals.
- Government websites – official government pages that make available different legal documents that are valid in their jurisdictions.
- Legal aid organizations – NGOs that offer legal services to those in need may also have free legal document databases on their websites.
- Legal software platforms – software companies that offer legal technology can also have databases of templates or quick fill-in forms for different legal documents.
- Document automation online tools – platforms that allow users to automate various processes, including document drafting using fillable forms.
- Legal education portals – law students and interns have different platforms available for training and finding resources such as legal documents.
- Library or university databases – these institutions often have archives available to members or broader public that can contain legal documents.
Websites that offer document templates are often specialized for particular country. This usually means that they were written by legal professionals whose expertise covers laws and regulations specific for those countries. That way, lawyers can more easily find the right template and use it without the need for extensive adjustment. Here are some of these sites.
USA Legal Documents
Australia Legal Documents
UK Legal Documents
Factors to Consider When Looking for Legal Documents Online
A lot of websites and online tools offer free or paid legal documents, but there are a few factors that you need to consider before using a template.
- Quality – The overall quality and look of the document is one of the first things you will notice. This can include the appropriateness of the language used for writing, the completeness, as well as style and format.
- Use-case – In some cases, using generic legal templates could bear some risks, since one-size-fits-all solutions can miss out on possible nuances specific to your situation.
- Jurisdiction – There can be variations in legal requirements across different jurisdictions. When browsing platforms servicing global legal audience, professionals should verify whether the template is applicable and valid in their respective jurisdiction.
- Credibility of source – The credibility of the website or online tool where you found the document is another thing worth considering. Reliable sources are likely to hire legal experts to draft their templates, which ensures they meet the standard.
- Specific details - Some generic templates may lack necessary clauses or essential details related to your situation. In those cases, you may need to customize the template to fit the requirements of your case.
How to Streamline Document Processing Even More?
Undoubtedly, using a professionally made legal document template speeds up the drafting process and improves the efficiency of a legal team. There are also other ways to boost legal workflow even more. One of the ways that can make different stages of legal document processing easier is automated comparison.
After you have filled out a template and completed the first draft, it is time for multiple reviews, editing in collaboration with coworkers, and changes during negotiations with various parties. Tracking the alterations during that process is a tedious but necessary measure that can be significantly streamlined with document comparison solutions.
Legal comparison software, such as Draftable Legal, uses unique algorithms to read documents the same way a human would, only faster, and more accurately identify all differences between documents(PDF, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Text).
By combining comparison software and pre-made templates, several stages of the lifecycle of a legal document can be streamlined, thus helping boost overall productivity.
Disclaimer:
This article is NOT purporting to provide legal advice;
We are NOT responsible for any of the third-party resources mentioned in this article.
In using any resources, you should solely rely on your own judgement and do so at your own risk.
Legal Document Comparison Solution
