Standard Legal offers Legal Document Preparation Service for nearly all of the titles it produces as self-help legal forms software. However, there are some exceptions — and good reasons behind those exceptions.
Standard Legal does NOT offer Legal Document Preparation Service to create or handle a Living Trust, No-Fault Divorce, Bankruptcy, Premarital Agreement or Separation Agreement, even though these titles are offered by Standard Legal as self-help legal forms software.
The reason that Standard Legal does not offer Legal Document Preparation Services for these specific titles is that many of the decisions that need to be made during the process of completing the forms is so personal in nature that the line of questioning required to generate a legal decision can sometimes fall into the gray area of “providing legal advice”.
Remember, even when Standard Legal helps a person create the legal documents that he or she needs through its Legal Document Preparation Service, that person is still acting “pro se” — or “on one’s own behalf” — during the process. Standard Legal helps the person by going though each form and form “field” and making sure that the data for each form is wholly complete and accurately transcribed. But the content of the form being created is provided solely by the customer and is 100% the responsibility of the customer.
Since some legal topics like Bankruptcy, Divorce, Living Trust, etc. require multiple-stage considerations and answers (i.e. “if A then B, but if C then D”), it is much more difficult for the document preparation specialist to remove himself from the decision-making process during the completion of the form(s).
In other words, the nature of the questions required to determine the answers needed for specific sections of the legal forms opens up the possibility that the questions themselves may lead the customer to answer one way or another. Thus, this situation gets closer to “providing legal advice”, something that is not permissible since no attorney-client relationship is created through our Legal Document Preparation Service.
Thus, Standard Legal offers clear and concise instructions within the do-it-yourself legal forms software for Bankruptcy, No-Fault Divorce, Living Trust, Premarital Agreement and Separation Agreement, and highly recommends these software titles to its customers. But if a customer feels for any reason that he cannot create these documents on his own, we suggest that person find a qualified local attorney to help him do so.