Massachusetts Probate and Family Court Financial Forms Once Again Require Colored Paper
June 24, 2008
This just in:
The [Massachusetts] Probate and Family Court has amended Uniform Practice XXXIII. Standards for Computer-Generated Forms. The Court has received numerous complaints since the change was made last year in allowing the filing of Financial Statements and Child Support Guidelines Worksheets on white paper. Requiring that the forms be printed on colored paper will assist our staff and judges in identifying the forms in the case folder and that they remain unavailable for public inspection. Colored forms will also make the forms more readily identifiable to lawyers and litigants.
You can see the updated Uniform Practice XXXIII here (PDF link), as well as read the official press release here (again, PDF link).
We have of course updated TurboLaw’s document notices to include these new rules. If your TurboLaw has been checking for updates automatically, then the next time you open a financial form you will see the reminder about the new paper color rules.
Lawyers like to Blog
October 7, 2005
The New York Times has this article about how popular law blogs (sometimes called “blawgs”) are becomming with lawyers. From the article:
“It’s all words, that’s all the law is,” Scott Turow, a lawyer and the author of “Presumed Innocent” and other novels, said when asked to speculate on reasons for the proliferation of law-related blogs, sometimes called blawgs. When people think of law, he continued, “You think of jails and marshals and corporate executives. But the reality is, that’s what it is - it’s all words, and lawyers are verbal people, both in terms of the written stuff and the spoken stuff.”
Open-Source Massachusetts
September 7, 2005
Recently, Massachusetts announced that all documents “created and saved” by state employees from the beginning of next year “would have to be based on open formats.” These open formats include OpenDocument, which is used by OpenOffice - the open-source competitor to Microsoft Office - and Adobe’s PDF format.
Here are some news stories about this announcement:
Legal worries led Massachusetts to open standards - ZD Net
US state embraces open standards - ZD Net
Massachusetts Mandates Open-Format Documents, Edges Towards Linux - eWeek
Although TurboLaw does not (yet) work with OpenOffice, there is a free program available to let you save any document in PDF format, thus complying with the above-mentioned rule. The program, called “PDF Creator,” is available for download by clicking here. PDF creator is easy to install and works perfectly alongside TurboLaw.
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