Forms at Your Fingertips: We’ve all heard...

Forms at Your Fingertips: We’ve all heard about software designed to help users write their own wills. And the best-known titles from Berkeley’s Nolo Press are do-it-yourself manuals that walk laypeople through legal matters that used to require a lawyer, along with his or her fees.

Now Marina del Rey-based North Communications has made some family law matters even easier to navigate without paid counsel. The small high-tech company makes QuickCourt, a touch-screen kiosk that provides information and prints out completed legal forms, including petitions for divorce or legal separation and forms for small-claims actions.

The system charges $30 for completing each of these petitions or forms. To do its job, the ATM-like machine solicits personal information, which the user types on a keyboard.

QuickCourt was introduced in a pilot project in Arizona in 1993. Today, the machines are found throughout Arizona and Utah and, as of this year, in Sacramento and Ventura counties too. California will be the acid test for QuickCourt, at least for marital dissolutions, thanks to the sheer number of divorce requests here--10,000 filed every year in Sacramento County alone.

Curiosity about the machines has run high.

“We’ve gotten a lot of calls about it, and a lot of people are coming and looking at it, pressing the buttons,” says Ruth Nunez-Schaldach of the Sacramento County Law Library.

Those who have used QuickCourt have commented on how easy it is to understand and how good the completed forms look, she says. And good-looking forms may be more than just aesthetically superior to their sloppily filled-out counterparts.

“[Many people] produce papers that the court can’t read, or that are incorrectly filled out, or that have information missing,” according to Nunez-Schaldach. “The court and the library saw a need for people to get this done inexpensively” and accurately, she said.