Online Legal Form Creates Legal Problem for Landlord

A North Carolina landlord who is being sued by the state’s Attorney General over security deposit violations says his lease is to blame. . . . In a news interview, he explains that he found the form lease on a realtors’ website, and did not realize that the security deposit provisions in the form contradicted current security deposit laws in North Carolina.

Other landlords can learn from the mistake. When using online rental forms, be sure to choose forms from a source that has both state-specific and up-to-date forms. One problem with using forms from websites is the difficulty in determining whether the law has changed since the form was posted.

It’s always a good idea to run the online form past an attorney before using it for the first time. That way, you catch any mistakes early on, before mass-producing the problem for every tenant.

The Attorney General says he will be seeking a $5,000 penalty against the landlord for each security deposit violation.

Landlord Says Lease Form to Blame for Legal Woes, American Apartment Owners Association, August 22, 2013.

Free Legal Forms Online

Adams Drafting, a blawg of interest primarily to business attorneys, has an interesting post and following discussion regarding the use, misuse, and dangers of free legal forms found on the Internet or elsewhere: With Free Online Forms, You Get What You Pay For. Excerpts:

The problem isn’t a shortage of free legal forms online. Instead, it’s that there’s available online for free a vast and ever-growing supply of contract models, most of them crappy, and separating what’s OK, in terms of language and substance, from what’s not OK is a gruesome task....


I see the problem as being not that the documents are inherently incorrect in themselves - I’m sure the good sites produce very sound documents - but that they are drafted in the abstract. If a person pulls a document from any standard database - whether one of these sites or their own firm’s standards - it will be blind luck if it actually works for the agreement they are trying to draft for without amendment. Then there seem to be three options:

(i) The document as just used as-is - the document is unlikely to fit the deal.
(ii) A non-lawyer makes some changes. The problem here is the risk of unintended legal consequences of a change.
(iii) A lawyer reviews it. Clearly the issue here is cost.

I suppose people just need to balance those factors, but for any deal worth anything significant, it is likely to be worth having a lawyer have a look, at which point it is more cost-effective for them to use their own standards.

See also Factual Error Found On the Internet, The Onion, 2002.