Inside Track: Turn to the Web for practice forms:

By Bev Butula, manager of library services, Davis & Kuelthau

Nov. 3, 2010 – The use of forms is commonplace in the practice of law. There are many great fee-based options available, including the State Bar of Wisconsin, Wisconsin Legal Blank, Financial Institution Products Corporation (FIPCO), Westlaw, and Lexis. However, individuals can find numerous forms free online. This article highlights some of those resources.

Real estate forms

Chicago Title Insurance Company offers a nice selection of Wisconsin forms, including various lender documents, conveyance documents, American Land Title Association forms, and general real estate forms. Most are available in either Word or PDF.

The Wisconsin Department of Regulation and Licensing connects the researcher to a variety of WB forms. The website also includes general real estate broker forms and licensing documents.

Wisconsin county forms

Every county designs their website differently. This can make it difficult to quickly locate items of interest. The Wisconsin State Law Library supports a superior search tool to identify what county forms are available online throughout Wisconsin.

The researcher starts on the State Law Library’s “County Resources” page. From here, choose the county of interest and check the “forms” box. Executing the search will produce a list of forms available for that particular county. These forms range from court forms to birth certificate applications to quit claim deed forms. Some counties offer a significant number of online forms (e.g., Manitowoc County), while others have very few (e.g., Forest County).

Federal agency forms

Many of us are familiar with the comprehensive forms library available from the Internal Revenue Service. What if the forms we seek are from a different agency? I recommend using either Forms.gov or Forms from the Feds.

Forms.gov is the federal government’s “official hub for federal forms.” The researcher can conduct a keyword search, browse by agency, or review an alphabetical listing by document title. Personally, I find the alphabetical list a bit cumbersome since the user may not know the exact name of the item. The FAQ page indicates that this site contains more than 5,400 forms.

“Forms from the Feds” is a site maintained by the University of Memphis Library. The site supplies “those forms most asked for by the public” and is no way an exhaustive list. The hyperlinks provided take the researcher directly to the appropriate page on an agency’s website.

General forms

The Internet Legal Research Group (ILRG), via their PublicLegalForms.com site, provides more than 2,000 samples. Topics range from credit/collection forms, to power of attorney forms, to various documents addressing the protection of legal rights. The ILRG offers $50 to anyone “who can demonstrate that one of our forms is not compliant with state law.” They also supply a portal for nationwide corporate and business filing information.

Findlaw maintains a form and contract database. The collection includes various legal forms and sample business contracts. Contracts cover various industries and are actual documents from companies throughout the United States. Since the top set of hyperlinks are fee-based forms provided by USLegalForms.com, the researcher must scroll down to the section entitled “Sample Business Contracts” to review the free options.

About the author

Bev Butula is the manager of library of services at Davis & Kuelthau, Milwaukee. She is a past president of the Law Librarians Association of Wisconsin. Bev has written articles and spoken to numerous groups on issues such as effective Internet research, evaluation of Web sites and legal research. Prior to obtaining her Master's Degree in Library Science from UWM, Bev was a litigation paralegal.

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