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Wednesday, January 08, 2014

Savvy support: Old Forms and New Forms, Part 2

As you might be aware, keeping MerusCase's court form library up-to-date is a constant task, as the courts frequently introduce new forms and retire old ones. Once a court introduces a new form, we here at MerusCase Support not only have to put fields in to it and upload it for use by all firms in MerusCase, but we also have to mark the form it replaces as an old, "legacy" form. By keeping the old forms in the system, we ensure any existing copies of these old forms in cases can still be viewed, edited, and printed.
Usually, this updating process is fairly seamless, as the courts identify most of their forms by form ID numbers: even if a form changes its name, the ID number and revision dates usually make it easy to pick out the form you want. I used "usually" a few times here because this ease of use relies on the court maintaining consistency as forms are replaced over time, and consistency isn't something at which they always succeed.

A particular example of this is one of the California WCAB's Qualified Medical Examiner forms, QME 106. Due to some law changes, the WCAB introduced TWO forms at the end of 2012 to replace QME 106: a mostly-unchanged QME 106 for dates of injury before 1/1/2013, and a QME 106a for dates of injury after 1/1/2013. 

To add to the confusion, the court had added "For injury dates on or after 1/1/2013" to the name of the form, despite knowing this form would probably be superseded one day. This happened pretty quickly, with the WCAB seemingly coming to its senses regarding two separate forms replacing one previous form and issuing a new QME 106 for  all dates of injury in October of 2013. Thus, we had a "QME 106a - For dates of injury after 1/1/2013 - Legacy" and a "QME 106" alongside each other in MerusCase.

We've since had a few calls and emails wondering which form to use. For clarity, we have to keep the form names as they're displayed in MerusCase close to the real names of the form, so "QME 106a - For dates of injury after 1/1/2013 - Legacy" stays for now. Hopefully, as time passes and 2014 approaches, people will naturally gravitate towards the QME 106 with the newer revision date. Until then, we're happy to explain the difference.

                                    Written by Paul Bertucci, Migration Coordinator and Technical Support Engineer at MerusCase
Posted by MerusCase on Wednesday January 08, 2014 0 Comments

Labels: Engineering

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