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Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Savvy Support: Old Forms & New Forms

MerusCase features an extensive library of PDF court forms, ranging from California's local rules forms to USCIS immigration forms. At present, our most frequently-used forms are forms used by the California Division of Workers' Compensation: WCAB forms. 

Adding new forms and keeping the existing forms up-to-date is a continuous task: DWC forms in particular are checked against the court's website every month, and any new revisions of forms put out by the court are added to MerusCase. 

When adding new forms to Merus, we also have the goal of avoiding a "compatibility break." To preserve any existing forms that have already been filled out in cases, we create entirely new forms with the newer revision and mark the old form as a "legacy" form. We also show the revision dates of forms in MerusCase, allowing users to quickly see which version of the form to use.

The term "legacy" here can sometimes cause confusion, especially among legal professionals, where it means (according to the Random House Dictionary) "a gift of property, especially personal property, as money, by will; a bequest." In MerusCase, however, we use in the engineering/computer science context, where it means "software or hardware that has been superseded but is difficult to replace because of its wide use."

We received an email earlier this week about one particular WCAB form, with the user mentioning that our copy of this form was out-of-date. That was true enough: they were looking at a  WCAB form which they typically use, but they'd missed the recently-added "legacy" in the form's title.

We HAVE had users let us know about outdated forms before we got the chance to find them ourselves, so the first thing we did was double-check the DWC's website to confirm that our form revisions were all current. 

We then took a look at the case on which this user had filled out the form, and we noticed that the most recently-created form in that case had "legacy" in its title. This form had been updated  very recently, and our name-switch to indicate the form's obsolescence hadn't been noticed. We let the user know about legacy forms and pointed out the sortable revision date column, and they thanked us for keeping our forms current.
                                    Written by Paul Bertucci, Migration Coordinator and Technical Support Engineer at MerusCase
Posted by MerusCase on Wednesday November 20, 2013 0 Comments

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