Be Wary of Free Legal Forms From the Web

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Among small-business owners, there are many horror stories about the $30,000 legal dispute that cost $30,000 to win.

The good news is that, since the dawn of the digital age, entrepreneurs have tried to use the power of the Web to make legal work cheaper. Software heavies like Microsoft(MSFT) and Sun Microsystems(JAVA) have built legal templates into their office products. And startups like Nolo, Legaldocs.com and LegalZoom.com have added interactive features to these static pages to improve the efficacy of legal forms.

These days, $9 buys a basic will (a must for every small business owner. You think probate court for an individual is bad; think about your family fighting over your assets and obligations without written guidance). And $350 offers you more custom options that allow you to fill in specific assets and instructions.

But leave it to 8-million-pound digital gorilla Google(GOOG) to release a game-changing legal application for small businesses. Earlier this month, Google teamed up San Fransisco-based Rocket Lawyer (small business plans start at $40 per month), which will offer legal forms in the template section of Google Docs. These forms connect to Rocket Lawyer's larger Web-based service. I gave the new tools a test drive.

What you get: This is a cheap, if limited, way to manage basic small-business legal tasks

Legal templates are nothing new. Law documents that users can modify themselves have been available in mass publication since the beginning of mass publication. In fact, when RocketLawyer got started in 2007, it purchased Broderbund's legal document archive, which was more than 20 years old.