Legally Easy is a free source of legal help, news and information from Charley Moore and the legal team at RocketLawyer.com. Rocket Lawyer is the easiest way to make a legal document, find a lawyer and get free legal advice for yourself and your business.
Healthcare Reform - Legal Rights and Medicare
As healthcare reform continues to dominate the news, now is a good time to look at your legal rights under Medicare, the biggest government program that affects millions of Americans. Pictured here is Attorney Joseph S. Carp, whose practice includes Medicare legal issues.
Medicare is a health insurance program run by the U.S. government. It is a single payer health care system that covers people over the age of 65 and others who meet special status criteria. In our opinion, the websites run by the government, like medicare.gov, can be pretty confusing, so we're working on delivering the simple information and easy tools you need to exercise your healthcare legal rights. Medicare consists of four parts - Part A through Part D.
Medicare Part A (hospital insurance) covers hospital care, limited post-hospital skilled nursing facility care, part-time home health services, and hospice care. If you are 65 years old or over, you can receive Medicare Part A insurance without having to pay a premium if you are currently receiving or eligible to receive but have not yet filed for either Social Security or Railroad Retirement benefits or if you or your spouse had Medicare-covered employment by the government. If you are under 65, you can receive Medicare Part A insurance without having to pay a premium if you have received either Social Security or Railroad Retirement benefits for twenty-four (24) months or if you are a kidney transplant or kidney dialysis patient. If you have been denied a Medicare Part A claim, click here for a Medicare Part A Appeal Denial Form.
Medicare Part B (Supplemental Medical Insurance) covers physician's services, certain outpatient hospital services (including emergency room visits), ambulances, diagnostic tests, laboratory services, certain preventive care services such as mammography and pap smear screening, outpatient therapy services, durable medical equipment and supplies, and home health care services not covered by Part A.
Medicare Part B pays 80% of approved charges for most covered services. The beneficiary is responsible for paying a deductible each calendar year as well as the remaining 20% of the Medicare approved charges. The beneficiary may have to pay additional charges if the doctor providing the care does not agree to Medicare's approved charges. If you have been denied a Medicare Part B claim, click here for a Medicare Part B Appeal Denial Form.
Medicare Part C (Medicare Advantage plans) gives Medicare beneficiaries the option of receiving their Medicare benefits from private health insurance plans.
Medicare Part D (Prescription Drug plans) makes those eligible for Medicare Parts A or B, eligible for certain access to funded prescription drug benefits.
The sensational break-up of America's most famous television family again highlights the legal side of family life. According to the San Francisco Examiner, "on Monday, June 22nd, divorce documents were filed in the Berks County courthouse."
In their televised announcement of the divorce, Jon Gosselin said: "Kate and I have decided to separate...I am stil in the show, but we'll interview separately. Nevertheless, apparently, TLC will continue to air the Jon & Kate Plus 8 show. Mom, Kate Gosselin, said (really) "the show must go on."
While the blogesphere and mainstream media is full of angst over whether, on its face, the televising of the Gosselin saga borders on child abuse, will the continuation of the show possibly do some good by illuminating some of the issues faced by children of broken marriages? Divorce, child support and raising good children after bad marriages is part of life. Now, is it possible that the Jon & Kate Plus 8 show might actually live up to "reality?"
Before, during and after a marriage, couples and families experience a romantic, legal and financial relationship. It is a good idea for everyone to learn about the legal side of marriage, such as prenuptial agreements, child care, child custody and for some, divorce and child support. The Rocket Lawyer Family Legal Help Guide is a good place to start.
Lawyers add Easy Legal Documents to any Website and Blog
We're happy to announce that any lawyer can now add a customized easy legal document service to any attorney website or blog! It's simple, just click the link on this widget to get started and add value for every legal website or blog visitor who is looking for do it yourself legal documents.
Plus - whenever anyone needs help with a document, Rocket Lawyer's patent-pending Click-through Legal Review(TM) system can automatically route clients to their favorite attorney to deliver the legal services they need on the spot. For lawyers, adding the legal document service to your site or blog can be another important step toward establishing full service relationships with clients for a lifetime.
Planning Your Estate - Estate Taxes are Here to Stay
According to the Wall Street Journal and other news reports, the Obama administration and congress are planning "to move soon to block the estate tax from disappearing in 2010, suggesting the levy might outlive the 'Death Tax Repeal' movement that has worked against estate taxes for many years. Approved by President Bush and congress in 2001, elimination of most inheritance taxes has been phased-in over several years, pending full abolition of such levies as of 2010; however, again, according to a Wall Street Journal article, "the Senate Finance Committee will move within weeks" to reverse the Bush law, in order to preserve the estate tax.
Based on the WSJ report, there are a couple of likely scenarios:
Under the plan articulated during the campaign, the Obama administration would lock in the estate tax at the most recent roll-back rate and exemption levels (i.e., exempting estates of $3.5 million to $7 million for couples from estate taxes while taxing estates above that level at 45%.
On the other hand, if congress were to roll-back the estate tax rate to the levels seen during the Clinton administration, then the first $1 million would be exempted from taxation with the remainder of the estate taxed at 55%.
Now is the time to engage in your own estate planning. There are several tactics that you can employ to reduce the exposure of your estate to taxation while providing for your charitable interests and love ones. RocketLawyer.com's Estate Planning Legal Help is a good place to start, along with creating your own trust and finding an estate planning lawyer to help you.
Rocket Lawyer to Preview Web Law Office 2.0 at SaaS Conference
Thanks to the support and feedback of our members, RocketLawyer.com has been selected to deliver a company Preview presentation at this year's SIIA OnDemand Software as a Service conference. SIIA OnDemand is widely viewed as the premier industry gathering for the SaaS market, with attendees from Salesforce.com, IBM, Oracle and many other companies, media and technology investors. According to SIIA's announcement, Rocket Lawyer was "chosen by the Software & Information Industry Association from among 82 candidate companies for the opportunity to present their products and services to OnDemand Conference Attendees."
The Rocket Lawyer Web Law Office(tm) is the easiest way for lawyers to produce legal documents in collaboration with new and existing clients, other counsel and other parties. Stay tuned for our official Web Law Office 2.0 announcement Tuesday morning, and thanks again for helping us make Rocket Lawyer work better for everyone!
Use this simple form to respond to a request from a bank or creditor of an employee to verify the employee's employment with your business.
When employees need a verification of employment, the business owner or manager is typically asked, either verbally or in writing to confirm certain information about the employee's status with the organization.
A Home Sale Worksheet Can Make Selling Your House Easier
In a tough real estate market like this one, being prepared and organized can help you to maximize your chances of getting the most the value of your home and avoiding problems during the home sale process. Suprisingly to many, pending home sales rose by 7.4% in the most recent monthly report, according to the Wall Street Journal. The report goes on to say that perhaps lower interest rates and lower home prices are beginning to make homes affordable enough to enable the over-all home sale market to improve.
If you are selling a home, you can use the Rocket Lawyer Home Sale Worksheet to organize your home sale process.
You can also use your Rocket Lawyer account to store all of your important home sale paperwork in the File Safekeeper. In fact, File Safekeeper is a great place to store all of your important legal documents for a lifetime.
Once your home sale and home ownership documents are securely uploaded to your Rocket Lawyer account, you can share them online with family, brokers, lawyers and anyone else that you would like to give secure access to your legal documents.
In this video, Attorney Arthur Miller discusses when a lawyer is needed when buying or selling a house.
Property owner and landlord toolkit for a tough economy.
If you are a property owner or property manager you already know that economic conditions are difficult for landlords. Here is a list of legal documents that can help landlords to protect themselves and their property against late rent, failure of tenants to pay rent altogether and other pitfalls of the slow economy.
Have every tenant sign a lease that has the protections landlords need. A good lease should provide for landlord entry to the premises, clear due dates for rent payments and clear and lawful penalties for failure of the tenant to adhere to the terms of the lease. Most of the up front work for a good lease can be done by the landlord; however, it is a good idea to engage a real estate attorney to help you when you need it.
You can find good sample lease legal forms here, that will create the obligations on the part of the tenant that you need to protect yourself as the property owner.
If a tenant pays the rent late, send a late rent notice like this one to the tenant to demand that the rent be paid, along with any late fees or other penalties provided by the lease agreement. Keep a record of all late notices. A good way to do that is by keeping all of your legal documents stored in the Rocket Lawyer File SafekeeperTM
Lexis-Nexis teams with RocketLawyer.com for easy online legal services!
Lawyers.comsm adds “do it yourself” options for common legal issues
Addition is one element of the new, interactive Lawyers.com legal community site
New York, NY – July 23, 2008 – LexisNexis announced today that Lawyers.comsm, the leading online resource for consumers and small business professionals to find an attorney and legal information, has added access to a comprehensive legal document service that combines “do it yourself” legal forms with online legal document review by real lawyers.
The additions come as part of a larger transformation of Lawyers.com by LexisNexis® Martindale-Hubbell® that includes implementation of a variety of new interactive features.
One of the key new capabilities is the Legal Document Services provided by RocketLawyer.com™. This set of services now enable users of Lawyers.com to save time by creating legal documents themselves, as well as accessing fast, affordable legal help online right when needed from Lawyers.com member attorneys.
“Today, more consumers and small business professionals use the web to research legal issues before contacting a lawyer, and with the right tools and services they can often handle simple legal matters on their own,” said Sharon Lubrano, vice-president of Client Development at LexisNexis. “The addition of services from RocketLawyer.com offers Lawyers.com visitors user-friendly online resources so they can act faster and more efficiently on common legal matters. And, they can find and connect with one of more than a million lawyers represented at Lawyers.com via the same, easy to use interface.”
“We’re gratified to provide Lawyers.com users with easy and affordable online legal document services,” added Charley Moore, Founder of RocketLawyer.com. He continued. “Combining our easy online legal documents and our patent-pending “Click-through Legal Review” by real attorneys, with Lawyers.com, now gives Web users everything they need to take control of their legal matters.”
More than just a legal forms site, RocketLawyer.com makes it easy to complete many personal and business legal matters at Lawyers.com. For example, individuals can use the service to set up a last will and testament, create a living will, produce a bill of sale, designate power of attorney and much more. Business can use the service to manage processes such as setting up non-disclosure forms, creating service contracts and employee agreements, producing real estate leases, creating licensing agreements and more.
All of this is accomplished via a powerful set of integrated services, including:
Interactive Legal Forms and Interviews. Users answer a few simple questions and create complete legal documents in minutes. These documents are ready immediately and available anywhere with Web access.
Document Collaboration and Sharing. Users can share documents and collaborate with family, legal counsel and other parties.
Click-Through Legal Review™. Users can access a network of attorneys who can review legal documents online for professional help.
Safe, Secure Online Document Vault. Users get peace of mind by backing up their important papers with FileSafekeeper™.
E-Signatures. Users save time and paper by signing legal documents electronically via a computer, cell phone or PDA.
In addition to new capabilities from RocketLawyer.com, Lawyers.com has expanded its vast database of practice area articles and information for consumers and small business professionals to include:
Life Changing Events – Helpful information on legal issues that arise in most peoples’ lives, such as divorce, starting a business, creating a will and more.
Community and Interactive Features – Interact with lawyers through community message boards, “Ask A Lawyer,” scheduled online sessions to discuss specific legal issues, and more.
Videos - Clips from experts on common legal issues
Blogs – Attorney insights on current key legal issues and trends
On the Docket – Read questions other consumers and small businesses are asking and benefit from the answers
“All of these new elements are great examples of the ongoing transformation of Lawyers.com from a large and useful online directory into an interactive online community where individuals and small businesses can find, discuss, learn and take action on legal issues that matter to them,” said Lubrano.
For more information, contact:
Yolanse Lau Marketing Manager RocketLawyer.com marketingmgr@rocketlawyer.com 415.738.6337
One of the best kept secrets in a world of televised celebrity lawyers in expensive suits is that there are thousands of affordable real lawyers here to help you with your legal questions and issues.While celebrity attorneys may offer general information on TV and on the radio, real people have real questions that are specific to their lives and business matters that don’t fit into neatly canned answers.Real people also have personal and business legal documents that they need a real lawyer to review, revise and complete at a reasonable price.
Until now, these real people with their real legal documents would need to find a lawyer, go to the lawyer’s office (an office that costs money that results in higher legal bills for the client), pay for copies, mail, fax and other expenses, and then wait for the legal document, such as a legal will, a power of attorney, a lease or a business contract, to be finished, often after several weeks.Alternatively, a real person might try a web site that offers do it yourself legal forms.Most of these sites seem to offer nothing more than a downloadable PDF or word processor document, with little legal help and legal information.Other sites might have fill-in worksheets for legal documents and then require the person to wait for the document to be completed offline and mailed to them later.In either scenario, the real person is often left back where they started – needing affordable legal help and not being able to find it.
But wait – there is finally a better way, a way to have the best of both worlds – do it yourself legal documents, plus legal help and legal document review by real lawyers online!RocketLawyer.com offers both easy to use interactive free legal documents that real people can complete as well as click-through legal review by real lawyers.Now, a real person can fill in as much or as little of their legal documents as they feel comfortable with and then find a lawyer to help them online – without the need to visit a lawyer’s office or wait for the mail to complete the legal document.
If you are a lawyer, and you would like to join the growing RocketLawyer.com virtual law office network to begin offering your services online, just start here – and, best of all, it’s completely free for join the network and get a free professional profile here!
Doing your taxes yourself has never been easier. Here are some tax time tips to help you get the most out of the many free and low cost tax return filing resources available online. Filing your taxes yourself can be really simple or more involved, depending on the amount of information you want to consider.
Where to start?
RocketLawyer.com offers discounted H&R Block® tax return services online. Every Rocket Lawyer member saves up to 30 percent off the cost of their online tax return. Since everyone needs tax services, this is a great way to get the most out of your Rocket Lawyer membership. If you are already a Rocket Lawyer member, login to access your discounted tax filing services. If you don’t have a membership yet, now is the time to become a Rocket Lawyer member and save even more. Go to: http://www.rocketlawyer.com/.
RocketTax.com makes it simple to complete and file your tax return in a few clicks online. You can trust the tax services from Rocket Tax because it's in partnership with H&R Block, the leader in tax help. Go to: http://www.rockettax.com/.
IRS.gov includes every U.S. Tax form, such as the U.S. Tax 1050 form, the 1050 EZ form, tax Schedule C and all of the other official tax forms, schedules, tax worksheets and tax instructions.
Whether you decide to do your tax filing homework or to just let the easy interactive tax return interviews at RocketTax.com do it for you, filing your taxes yourself should take less time and money than ever.
Do you have a list of the essential legal documents for this stage of your life? If the answer is yes – congratulations! You're ahead of the curve...so long as you have executed and properly filed your legal documents.
However, if the answer is no, you're not alone. Most adults don't have an Estate Plan. Similarly, most entrepreneurs, home-based business owners and other small business owners either haven't filed Articles of Incorporation (or LLC documents) for their business or don't keep regular Corporate Minutes. Missing personal and business legal documents increases the risks that your family and business can face in unforseen circumstances.
Want more free information and help? Now, you can easily and quickly complete your personal legal care check up and get the customized information you need in minutes. Just go to RocketLawyer.com and click FREE Legal Care Check-Up "Start Now" .
Use a Non-disclosure Agreement to Protect Your Intellectual Property
Do you have an idea for a new product or service?Need to discuss it with potential customers, investors or perhaps even competitors?If so, think about protecting your idea with a simple confidentiality agreement (also known as a “Non-disclosure Agreement, or “NDA” for short).
A Nondisclosure Agreement is contract under which the person (or organization) receiving information from anther person (or organization) agrees not to disclose proprietary and confidential information that it receives in this context. This type of agreement may be useful in a variety of circumstances. For example, a company might choose to share information with a sales consultant for the purpose improving its sales performance. In such a situation, the company would probably be sharing product and customer information with the consultant and would want to protect this information from disclosure by the consultant to third parties.
Some typical provisions that are included for the protection of the Owner include the following:
No Warranty. There is a possibility that the Confidential Information could contain mistakes or errors, or be based on assumptions that later prove to be incorrect. Therefore, it is common for Owners to include a "no warranty" provision that specifies that the Owner will not be responsible for any damages that the Recipient might incur from using the Confidential Information.
Risk of Disclosure. In addition to the "No Warranty" provision, the Owner may also want to provide that any disclosure made by the Recipient of any information is at the Recipient's risk. Because the Owner has already stated that it will not warrant the accuracy of the information, the Owner can further provide that the Recipient will bear the risk of using the information in violation of the agreement. For example, if the Recipient acts on some of the information and the information was inaccurate, the Recipient cannot hold the Owner responsible for the harm caused by the inaccurate information.
Limited License. Generally, the Owner and the Recipient intend that the Confidential Information will only be used by the Recipient for the limited purpose of reviewing the information and becoming familiar with the Owner's business to determine whether the parties might have interest in future transactions (based on some additional agreement). A "limited license" provision makes it clear that the Recipient is not acquiring the right to use the Confidential Information on a general basis.
General Provisions. A Nondisclosure Agreement should include provisions that (i) require amendments (changes) to the agreement to be in writing and signed by both parties, (ii) specify the state whose laws will govern and interpret disputes between the parties regarding the matters covered by the agreement, and (iii) prohibit the parties from assigning their obligations under the agreement to third parties. Generally, the state whose laws should govern the agreement should be the state of the Owner or the Recipient.
From time to time, everyone needs or provides services for pay. Services are the fastest growing part of our economy and it is important that you properly document services to be provided or purchased to avoid headaches down the road. Keep reading and we'll discuss some easy and affordable documents that you can use to put service relationships in writing. All of the documents discussed in this article can be easily created, saved and edited at RocketLawyer.com.
Service contracts document the terms of the sale of services. Everyday services from childcare to business consulting, special services like wedding photography and countless other situations can be documented with standard contracts. This article describes some of the common service contracts that you might need for both personal and business purposes.
In general, the basic elements of a contract to purchase services are:
Identification of the parties.
A description of the services to be performed.
The dates or scheduled dates for performance of the services.
Any conditions or limitations placed on either of the parties or warranties related to the performance of services.
Payment terms.
Work for Hire Agreements Hiring a nanny for childcare or a contractor to do some work on a house? In that case, you probably can use a Work for Hire Agreement. A Work for Hire Agreement is a document under which a "Service Provider" contracts to provide services for an individual or organization (the "Hiring Party"). Under this agreement, the Service Provider is an independent contractor, and not an employee, of the Hiring Party. This Agreement should not be used if the Service Provider is really an employee of the Hiring Party. In many respects, the Work for Hire Agreement is simply a short-form version of a Consulting Agreement.
Consulting Agreements Hiring a consultant to work in your business, or department? Consider documenting this independent contractor relationship with a Consulting Agreement. A Consulting Agreement is a document under which a consultant (someone who gives expert or professional advice or services) agrees to provide professional or consulting services. Under this agreement, the "consultant" is an independent contractor with respect to the "Hiring Party and not an employee of the Hiring Party. At RocketLawyer.com, this document allows the user to substitute any term for the term "consultant," and thus, this document can be adapted to many other situations that might involve an independent contractor.
General Service Contracts A General Contract for Services documents the terms of the sale of services by one company (the "Service Provider") to another company or an individual (the "Service Recipient"). This document should not be used if the Service Provider is an individual. The Work for Hire, Consulting Agreement, or Subcontractor Agreement documents, available at RocketLawyer.com, can be used for that purpose. This document only deals with services purchased from a business, and therefore, does not address issues related to independent contractor status.
All of these easy services contracts can be created using the simple wizards at RocketLawyer.com. Once complete, services contracts can be stored online for safety and future reference. Finally, you can also find a host of complimentary forms and agreements to further document your personal services relationship, like confidentiality and non-disclosure agreements and more.
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referral service" and does not provide or participate in any legal representation.
