When a firm decides to switch to MerusCase, we here at MerusCase Support offer to convert up to 80 of their commonly-used office letters to MerusCase Templates. During conversion, we take an office's existing .doc or .wpd letters, add MerusCase merge field code to them in place of "Doctor name," "Date of Injury," and so on, and then adding them to a firm's MerusCase account for common access by all users at that firm. 

MerusCase also has an extensive library of PDF court forms. Unlike firm-specific templates, these court forms are accessible to all firms. These forms are generally PDF-based, meaning the text of the forms isn't editable: auto-filled or manually typed data is "printed" on to them in the appropriate text fields and checkboxes. New forms and revisions of existing forms are constantly being added by the courts, and keeping all of these forms up-to-date in MerusCase is a full time task which we do for the benefit of all of our clients. 

Internally, firms don't always have this kind of differentiation between court forms and correspondence, especially at the staff/assistant level: a secretary opening a new Workers' Compensation case, for example, might draw on a folder of commonly-used documents including both that firm's custom Opening Client Letter and the DWC-WCAB's 1A Application for Adjudication of Claim.

One of our new firms recently provided us a handful of templates for MerusCase merge field conversion. Their templates were broadly similar to batches we've seen from other offices, but there were a few with painstakingly laid-out checkboxes and barcodes which our document creation specialists hadn't seen before.

I took a look at a few of these forms, and I immediately recognized them as California WCAB forms re-created as Microsoft Word documents. I suspected this firm had included court forms because they were unfamiliar with MerusCase's court forms library, so I shared my concerns with sales, who confirmed my suspicion: due to time constraints, this firm's initial demo had been very brief and court forms hadn't been covered in much depth.

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