About Court Forms Online

Court Forms Online is a free website built by the Suffolk Legal Innovation and Technology (LIT) Lab. It helps you create court forms and other legal forms. In some cases, we can deliver your forms directly to the court. Lawyers, law students, designers, and technologists helped turn each form into a simple to use and guided process. The Lab reviews forms regularly to keep them up to date.

While we consulted with and collaborated with both the Trial Court and the Appeals Court, Court Forms Online is not a project of the Massachusetts Court. The Appeals Court has issued a standing order that makes this website an officially approved way to deliver forms to the Appeals Court.

How does it work?

We use the free and open source tool Docassemble to ask you simple step-by-step questions and to turn them into filing-ready PDF documents for your legal case. You can use the interactive forms on a desktop computer or a smartphone.

Some forms need to be printed and delivered by you. Some forms include a button that delivers your form securely by email. We are working on integrating our forms with the Appeals Court electronic filing system directly. Suffolk LIT Lab delivers forms this way in Illinois as a certified third-party filer.

In other states

You can use our free tools to build your own interactive court forms! Check out the Document Assembly Line project documentation page to learn how.

The Document Assembly Line Project

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Suffolk LIT Lab was just 2 people: and one of us had been hired the day the University campus shut down. But we were inspired to help the thousands of Commonwealth citizens who suddenly were locked out of physical access to lawyers.

Our idea was to build dozens of interactive forms that included guidance and delivered your work directly to the court. Usually these projects take many months. We worked with agile experts to develop an "assembly line" style development process so that we could spread out the work among dozens of volunteers. We called our project the Document Assembly Line.

The response to our call for volunteers was amazing. More than 200 volunteers from around the world helped work on the Document Assembly Line--representing 11 time zones and 5 continents.

We no longer have 200 volunteers, but our lab and Suffolk University Law students have continued to help the project grow and thrive. Our work has also helped legal aid programs in Illinois, Louisiana, Maine, Vermont, Michigan, Minnesota, Texas and other states to build their own form libraries.