Mrs. Jones you've got a lovely son, - er, daughter.If you've taken the first step towards automating your family law practice,
you may have word processing documents that you use as templates to generate
Separation Agreements or Judgment Entries. That's better than having no
templates, but it has several drawbacks.
One drawback is that changes related to gender and number can be difficult to
track. For instance, have you ever reviewed a document at court and noticed an
embarrassing, typographical error, like referring to the husband as "she?" Or
making a reference to "children" when the parties have only one child? Over the
years, proofreading these familiar documents becomes increasingly difficult as
constant, repeated exposure makes errors harder to spot.
Another drawback relates to global variables—that is, information that
remains constant from one document to the next in the same case (for example,
the case number, the parties' names and addresses, and a host of other items).
Without Family Law Practitioner's Apprentice (FLPA), from the
initial complaint to the final judgment entry, you're constantly re-entering
information from one document to the next. This is true even with separate
templates.
FLPA handles these issues by having you make one-time
selections as to the gender of the parties and then FLPA
consistently changes all the nouns, pronouns, verbs and adjectives to agree with
your selections. Other basic information is handled the same way. Global
variables are administered globally.
In other words, once you enter the parties' names and case number in the
worksheet, the information populates all the forms and pleadings automatically.
Formatting and typing captions will be a thing of the past. You enter repetitive
information once! When it's correct the first time, you save time. No more
brainless grammatical errors in an otherwise perfect document.
Going Global
The faster you can generate perfect documents, the more you save in case
preparation time and staff time. That's why we give you the added ability to (1)
set global defaults via our DEFAULT.FLP file and (2) modify the program
templates to customize documents for your specific uses. So, if you have
certain, personalized, provisions in a particular document, you could alter our
Separation Agreement template to include your specific language—permanently.
Speed Thrills
The whole point of FLPA is for you to produce better documents
faster. It's especially user-friendly to law offices. Why law offices? Because
they are emergency rooms for the treatment of legal problems—you're meeting
deadlines, locating witnesses, taking depositions, interviewing clients, and the
list goes on. Typical law offices do not have the luxury of lazy afternoons with
nothing to do. There is simply no time to work on improving computer skills. But
while the typical law office computer user may be computer illiterate, they are
usually word processor wise! Why not? Documents are part of a law office's
stock-in-trade.
Feature List
In addition to completing all the documents listed in the shaded box to the
left, FLPA produces sets of blank worksheets that can be given to
clients for completion.
FLPA is able to extract information from Ohio Spousal
Support Calculator (MA)
so you only need to enter data one time and both programs can use it. It's no
exaggeration to say that with the client worksheets and our 3-pack of family law
programs (FLPA, MA & WROCSG), you'll be preparing for the final
hearing in the initial interview.
FLPA can extract child support amounts from Revised Ohio
Child Support Guidelines (WROCSG). It doesn't stop there,
however, because FLPA can also create and seed a child support
file, leaving very little to do but review and print the child support
worksheet. WROCSG is required to utilize this feature.
FLPA is a trial preparation tool that can organize and print
marital assets, marital debts, income information, living expenses, and more.
FLPA works seamlessly with any Windows word processor
capable of opening RTF files, including Microsoft's Word for Windows and
Corel's WordPerfect.
FLPA works in all 32-bit Windows systems and is
available in network versions.
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