How these forms are made

Why it is done this way

A statutory form is worth something only if it matches the statute. Twelve states print the wording of a lien waiver inside their own code, and in those states a form that paraphrases the law can be read more broadly than the person signing it meant, or can fail to count at all. Preliminary notices are the same: a notice missing a sentence the statute requires is a notice that did not happen. A near enough version of either one is not a weaker product, it is a worthless one.

So the statutory forms here are generated, not written. A script takes the captured text of the law as its input and cuts the headings, paragraphs and labels out of it by character position. What is written by hand is only the structure: which line is a heading, which blank takes which answer, and what to call that blank in plain English. If a quoted word is wrong, it was wrong in the captured file, and that file is in version control where it can be diffed.

How a form gets onto this site

1. The section is captured to a file. The text is read once from the source named on the page and written into a file of its own. There are 119 of them, one per section or group of sections.
2. A generator cuts the form out of that file. Not a copy of the file edited afterwards. The form data is rebuilt from the capture every time, so there is no hand edited middle version for a correction to get lost in.
3. Only characters the paper cannot carry are changed. Curly quotes, dashes, soft hyphens, non breaking spaces and long runs of leader dots become their plain equivalents, because the standard PDF fonts cannot draw them and the alternative is a dropped character or a black box. No word is added, removed, reordered or reworded.
4. The blanks are labelled in English. A statute prints a line to write on. This site prints a field to type into, with a label beside it saying what goes there. The label is ours. The sentence around it is the statute's.
5. The build refuses to ship a mismatch. A set of checks runs before anything is published: that the citation on a page names the section the page actually quotes, that every character typed into a form is still on the finished paper, and that no page states an inventory number that disagrees with the data. A failure stops the build rather than printing a warning nobody reads.

That covers thirty four lien waiver forms across twelve states and forty one statutory notice forms across twenty three.

Where the text came from

You do not have to take this on trust, because every statutory page here links the section it quotes. There are ninety one such links across the lien waiver pages, the state lien waiver law pages and the preliminary notice pages. Thirty seven of them point at the government's own publication of the code, across twenty two different state and federal sites. Fifty four point at a published legal database instead.

The official source is used wherever it can be read. The reason the other fifty four exist is worth stating plainly, because it is the same two reasons every time: some state legislature sites are behind a bot check, and some state codes are published only through a commercial service that requires you to accept an agreement before you can read them. Nevada is the first case and Georgia is the second, which is why the text for those two came from a legal database carrying the same section rather than from the state itself.

What we will not do

• We do not publish from a summary. Not a search result, not a law firm's article about the section, not a machine written summary of it. A form is built from the text of the statute or it is not built.
• We do not paraphrase a statutory form. Where a state prints wording, you get that wording. Where a state prints none, the page says so rather than inventing one and letting it look official.
• We do not defeat a bot check to get at a statute. When a state site is gated that way we use a published database carrying the same section, and we link it, so you can see exactly which text was read.
• We do not accept a terms of use agreement on your behalf in order to republish what is behind it.
• We do not quietly overwrite a capture. Re-reading a source writes to a new file first so it can be diffed against the committed one. Silently replacing it would destroy the only evidence that would tell us the law had changed.

The numbers on the calculators

The same rule applies to the figures the calculators use. A self employment tax rate, a standard mileage rate, the maximum slope for an unshored trench, the conversion factor for a ton of aggregate: each one is captured from the agency that publishes it, into a file, with the citation printed on the page that uses it. The tax rates come from the IRS, the trench slopes from the OSHA excavation standard, and the aggregate conversion from a published state transportation study. None of it is a figure somebody remembered.

What this is not

It is not legal advice, and accuracy of transcription is not the same thing as fitness for your job. Whether a statute applies to you turns on facts a web page never sees: which contract you are actually under, when completion legally happened, whether a notice was validly served. The legal disclaimer sets that out in full, and it is worth one read before you sign anything a site printed for you.

Found something wrong

Tell us, and include the state and the section number. A correction to a statutory form is the single most useful message this site gets, and it gets fixed at the capture so it cannot come back. The contact page has the address.