Hey everybody, it's Andy and welcome again to my office in Modesto, California. If you're
new to the channel, I'm an attorney licensed to practice law in California as well as New York
and in this video I'm going to go over how to get legal documents. Uh, or actually more accurately,
how to get kind of reliable or trustworthy legal documents. So, um, the basic scenario is something
like this: most people -- actually a surprising number of people, to be honest -- will actually have the
thought, the inclination, kind of the voice in their head that basically goes 'Hey, in this situation, I
think there should be something in writing. You know, I think the parties should sign something.
It should not all be oral. So that's good. That's actually really good news that, you know, most
people will have that thought that 'Hey, there should be something in writing here.' Here's the
bad news. The bad news, I guess, is that most people will then kind of go online and search for stuff.
Eventually they will find something, like Google is good enough, for instance, that they will basically
give you some type of legal document eventually, depending on how many searches you do.
If you find a legal document that you think applies to your situation, there's two problems
that you're going to run into potentially. The first is that you don't actually know
the, kind of, trustworthiness, I guess, or the slant or the bias or whatever for that particular site.
You have no idea if this site is run by a, you know, person who is reputable who is educated, trained,
etc on that particular topic. It could be something that, you know, this person is running out of their
basement. Could be fine otherwise, but maybe they have no training, maybe they kind of, you know,
invented all this stuff. This is what they feel, you know, should be correct and so forth.
So the website itself, you know, for example, might not be a trustworthy source kind of overall.
Assuming that it is a trustworthy source, though, the second problem you're going to run into
potentially is that you as a layperson -- somebody who probably has no experience with legal, you know,
legal documents, legal kind of items -- you're not going to be sure that this particular document
is applicable to your situation. Your best guess is that it probably is, but you could be wrong.
You have no idea if this document actually covers your situation exactly, or if it covers your
situation not at all, or if you know it applies a little bit, but, you know, other parts don't apply
etc and there's going to be edits that need to get made. So, um, yeah hopefully that makes sense. The
source itself might, may or may not be reputable. The document itself may or may not kind of apply
to your situation, um yeah. Hopefully it's going to apply at least somewhat, like it's not going to be
completely wrong, but a lot of times, though, in law, like you, you do have to get it completely correct.
You know, any type of mistake could, in theory, invalidate whatever document it is that, you know,
you're working with. Uh, so it is important to get it completely correct and not just
partially correct. Uh, yeah. So for lack of a better, you know, or, sorry, for better or worse rather, you
do need to kind of worry about these two mistakes or these these two potential mistakes. Alright? So, um,
that said then, there are basically sources online that I think are better, you know,
sources of documents than others, for instance. I'm going to go over two of them in this video.
They're both government websites so the thing is like I'm not sponsored by them, like, you
know, there's nobody who is kind of, you know, paying them, I guess, like, you know, to put out
these types of documents versus another type, for instance. So hopefully because they're government
sites they are at least more, uh, trustworthy than a site than, than a private entity would run. Alright?
So the first site I'm gonna go over is the Los Angeles County Clerk Recorders website, uh, which
I'll link down below actually. So if you go to that link, you'll find that they have a lot of
kind of template documents. For instance, powers of attorney, easements, mechanics liens, and stuff.
So they are a little bit specialized, I think, like not everybody is going to need a mechanic's lien
document, let's say, but if you do need a mechanic's lien document, rather than draft from, draft one
from scratch, hopefully you can take the one from the LA County Clerk Recorders website, let's say.
Hopefully that'll save you some amount of time. So, I mean, it might save you say, like, or sorry, it
might save you rather, prevent you from having to draft the document from scratch, but it's not going
to cover your situation precisely, obviously. It's a fill-in-the- blanks type of document.
So you might have to look at, er, sorry, you might have to take the 60% or something that, that is
drafted already and then fill in the remaining 40% yourself. Obviously like I said earlier, you got to
make sure you fill in the 40% correctly because if you don't, then the entire document might be
invalid, let's say, but the good news though is that if you have a template to work from,
it at least saves you that 60% or 50% or whatever it is, alright? So the LA
County Clerk Recorders website is fairly good. Um I've used a couple documents from there, I think.
So, uh, because again, because it's the government, like there's no, you know, bias or kind of motivation
one way or the other to try to sell you stuff. It's all free. Alright? So that's the first one
the LA County Clerk Recorders website. Uh, so number two is the Sacramento County Public law
library's website also. So, I guess a brief bit of background in case you didn't know.
California has 58 counties, you know, Santa Clara county, Stanislaus county, and so on and each county
in California actually has a public law library also. So this is different than the county law,
sorry, different than the county library where you might go to borrow novels or to read a magazine
or newspaper or borrow a movie or something. This particular public law library is just for legal
kind of research material. Uh so if you ever wanted to pull a random court case, let's say,
you have all those kind of, um, cases that are bound like those books on the shelf like there's like 20
volumes or something, those are generally going to be there. Um, yeah. So, I mean, like any type of legal
research that, you know, most likely the average person is probably not going to do unless they
absolutely have to. Um, you know, there, there are resources in every county in California to do that.
The Stanislaus County public library, law library is actually kind of up the road here.
Uh it's a little far from me. I've been to it a couple times before. Uh it's pretty decent, I think,
but, uh, yeah. So if you, if you're in Stanislaus County, I will go ahead and link, you know, the
Stanislaus County public law, law library's website down below and, you know, put their address down there
too just in case you didn't know that that even existed. So, um, anyway, but the public law library,
like I said, every county in California has one. Sacramento County's public law, law library itself
I've not been to it before, but their website is actually fairly good. Like the LA County Clerk
Recorders website, they have a bunch of legal documents up there. You know, mechanic's liens,
powers of attorney, that kind of thing. So again, it's basically something where it saves you
from having to draft a document like that from scratch. You know, you can use, like, say 60% or 50%
that's from the document that Sacramento County's law library, you know, provides you, but again the
remaining 50% or 40% or whatever, you actually do need to fill that in yourself. Uh and you also
need to fill it in correctly, uh, otherwise, you know, your document might be invalid, for example. Alright?
So, uh, hopefully that helps you. Again because these are both government websites it, you know, hopefully
there's not going to be any sort of motivation for them to try to sell you this or give you any
type of biased information. It's the government like, you know, they treat everybody the same.
So yeah, hopefully, that helps, you know, kind of save you some work at least and if you've ever needed
to see what a particular document, like a power of attorney, for example, looks like, hopefully getting
a template from the LA County Clerk Recorder's office or the Sacramento County,
sorry, Sacramento County, rather, public law library that at least gives you an idea of 'Oh, this is what
it's supposed to look like. Oh, that makes sense. Hmm. Okay.' So, uh, yeah, anyway hopefully that helps. Again,
I will link both of those websites down below and, uh, yeah, hopefully that helps you guys. Alright?
So go ahead and share, comment, like, subscribe and I will talk to you guys next time. Thanks.