Insights for California Family Lawyers
Can software fill out the FL-150 and FL-142 from client intake — and should you trust it?
Yes, several tools populate the FL-150 and FL-142 from a client questionnaire. None of them relieve you of reviewing the attachments and reconciling income against assets against any support figure. The failure mode is mismatched numbers, not empty fields. Lawyer review is mandatory under California Rule of Professional Conduct 1.1 and ABA Formal Opinion 512.
· FamilyLawyer.software
Every California family lawyer has the same scar: a client who was supposed to “just fill out the FL-150,” a PDF that came back half-blank, and a checking account that appeared on the schedule and vanished from the income declaration. Vendors will tell you the FL-150 is the most-rejected form in the set. That line is vendor copy — Aparti has used a version of it — and I have not seen an independent clerk-rejection study. What I have seen is worse than a blank: two completed forms that do not match.
So the question is not “can software type numbers into Judicial Council fields?” Of course it can. The question is whether you should trust the output with your name under penalty of perjury.
What the statute actually requires — not what the intake PDF implies
Preliminary declarations of disclosure are not a courtesy. Family Code section 2104 requires each party to serve a preliminary declaration of disclosure, executed under penalty of perjury on a Judicial Council form, including all tax returns filed by the declarant in the two years before service. The petitioner serves concurrently with the petition or within 60 days of filing it. The respondent serves concurrently with the response or within 60 days of filing it. The parties can extend those periods by written agreement or court order. They cannot waive the preliminary disclosure by agreement. Section 2104(g) is not subtle about that.
Family Code section 2105 is the final declaration: before or at the time the parties enter an agreement for resolution of property or support, or no later than 45 days before the first assigned trial date, unless properly waived on FL-144. Software that only knows how to start a case and cannot refresh a disclosure set is already the wrong tool for a matter that settles six months later.
The packet on the practitioner’s desk is familiar even if the statute numbers are not:
- FL-140 — Declaration of Disclosure (the cover sheet).
- FL-150 — Income and Expense Declaration, with pay stubs and the tax return the form demands.
- FL-142 — Schedule of Assets and Debts, or FL-160 as the property declaration some files use instead or in addition, depending on the posture.
- FL-141 — Declaration Regarding Service of Declaration of Disclosure and Income and Expense Declaration. This is what you file.
Software that fills the FL-150 and forgets that the FL-141 is the clerk’s gate has automated the wrong page.
The clerk’s gate is the FL-141. The FL-142 generally does not get filed.
Family Code section 2104(b) says the preliminary declaration of disclosure shall not be filed with the court, except on court order. The parties file proof of service. The Judicial Council FL-142 is bannered, in capital letters, “THIS FORM SHOULD NOT BE FILED WITH THE COURT.” Self-help on courts.ca.gov says the same thing in plainer English: these forms go to your spouse, not into the public file.
That is not a formatting preference. An FL-142 lists account numbers, balances, and often enough identifying detail to make a public docket into a gift for identity theft. You serve the schedule. You file the FL-141. If a default-with-agreement file uses FL-144 to waive finals, that is a different form with a different statutory hook — it is not permission to dump the schedule into eFileCA.
When people say “the clerk rejected my disclosures,” they usually mean the clerk rejected a judgment or a request for order because the FL-141 was missing, the FL-150 attached to an FL-300 was stale, or the form version was last year’s. They rarely mean a deputy clerk sat down with a calculator and compared Line 5 to the Wells Fargo statement. Inconsistent figures are a problem for the other side, the judge, and your malpractice carrier. Do not outsource that problem to “the software filled it in.”
CRC 5.260: “current” on the FL-150 means three months, unless the facts moved
California Rules of Court, rule 5.260 is the support-hearing rule everyone under-reads. For hearings involving child, spousal, or domestic partner support, both parties must complete, file, and serve a current Income and Expense Declaration, form FL-150. “Current” means the form has been completed within the past three months, providing no facts have changed. The form must be sufficiently completed to allow the court to make an order. A party requesting support attaches it to the FL-300; a party responding attaches it to the FL-320. Skip it and the request is procedurally defective. A Financial Statement (Simplified), FL-155, is available in some child-support-only postures; it is not a substitute in spousal support, family support, or attorney’s-fee proceedings.
That three-month clock is why “we generated the FL-150 at intake in January” is not a feature if the RFO is in May and the client changed jobs. Intake software that cannot refresh a declaration from the same canonical record is a first-draft machine. You still need a current form when you walk into the support hearing.
Line 11 is where tidy intake goes to die
FL-150 Item 11 is the asset snapshot: cash and deposit accounts (11a), stocks and other assets the party could easily sell (11b), and all other real and personal property at estimated fair market value minus the debts owed on those items (11c). It is not a miniature FL-142, and it is not equity-versus-gross trivia you can shrug off. 11a and 11b are gross. 11c is net of the debt on that property. The FL-142, by contrast, wants descriptions, dates acquired, gross fair market values, and encumbrances, with statements attached.
Here is the mismatch that gets lawyers in trouble:
- W-2 income on FL-150 Item 5 that cannot explain the deposit-account total on Item 11a or the checking line on the FL-142.
- A house on the schedule at “TBD” while Item 11c is blank or shows a round number the client invented on a phone.
- Pay stubs attached to the FL-150 that do not match Item 5, and a tax return attached because the form said so, reflecting a different year than the “last 12 months” column.
- A guideline printout from Xspouse or Family Law Software built on a third set of numbers that never got written back into the FL-150.
Empty fields are embarrassing. Mismatched fields are a credibility problem, a support problem, and in a bad case a Family Code section 2107 / 2122 problem. Software that cannot keep one income figure, one account list, and one property list is not “FL-150 software.” It is a typewriter.
What to demand from FL-150 / FL-142 software before you trust it
If you are buying or keeping a tool for this job, score it against the actual workflow, not the homepage.
| Criterion | Why it matters on a real file |
|---|---|
| Single canonical record | Income, accounts, and property are entered once and written to the FL-150, the FL-142 (or FL-160), and any later refresh. No re-key. |
| Client portal, not a PDF scavenger hunt | The client completes a guided interview over multiple sessions. Paper FL-150s have miserable completion rates. That is the bottleneck. |
| Attachment uploads at the painful questions | Pay stubs (last two months), tax returns (two years for the PDD; the FL-150 wants the most recent return), account statements, and Line 11 / FL-142 continuations. |
| Line 11 and FL-142 continuations | Room for more than three bank accounts and a “see attached.” Continuation sheets numbered to the item being continued, not a junk drawer. |
| Attorney lock on filing and download | The client cannot push the packet to court and should not be able to download an unreviewed FL-150. You remain the filer. |
| Current form revision date | Judicial Council revises on the 1 January / 1 July cycle. Last year’s FL-150 is a clerk problem. The tool must ship the current PDF, not your memory of 2024. |
| Knows the FL-141 is the filed document | A generator that e-files the schedule by default has failed the first statutory test. |
Named options, without a beauty contest
There is no public market-share ranking for this category. What follows is what the tools claim to do, which layer they occupy, and where the honesty requires a hedge. For the broader map of calculator versus PMS versus forms, see the 2026 California stack.
- Family Law Software. Certified calculator plus I&E / A&D declarations, with help on FL-150 Line 11 and FL-142 attachments. Local forms, per the vendor, for Orange, Riverside, Los Angeles, and San Mateo only. Not a 58-county client interview.
- DivorceDocs. Lawyer-facing FL-150 / FL-142 / FL-160 with a client link and Word output. Advertised around $49 a month. Vendor page claims; I did not run a live file through it for this article.
- Gavel California Family workflows. Statewide questionnaires you run or send. The firm can still break reconciliation by editing. Not a 58-county local-packet promise.
- SuperDocs + JurDocs. SoCal JC-plus-county library with a client portal. Independent reviews are thin. Bay Area “later,” by their FAQ.
- CEB Essential Forms. Legacy mapped JC and county library; Rapid Legal e-file in 30-plus counties. Form filler, not a client interview.
- Aparti, Divorcelift.ai, Ezel. 2025–2026 AI-intake entrants. Aparti’s copy is aggressive — label it vendor. Ezel leans consumer-filing assistant more than firm OS.
Clio Draft will hand you the current Judicial Council PDF. It will not, by itself, run a client through Line 11, attach two months of pay stubs, and reconcile the schedule. I am not repeating the longer Clio Draft conversation on this site. The disclosure test is narrower: one record, attachments, lock, current form.
You still review every page. That is not optional and it is not old-fashioned.
California Rule of Professional Conduct 1.1, comment [1], is the competence rule that includes technology. The CLA Ethics Spotlight on that comment specifically names family-law support software. You are expected to understand the tool well enough to know where it is guessing. ABA Formal Opinion 512 (July 2024) says the same thing in generative-AI language: the lawyer remains responsible for the work-product. Over-reliance is a competence problem, not a productivity hack.
Confidentiality is the twin duty. California Formal Opinion 2023-208 is the cloud-vendor diligence opinion. Reputation, terms, backup, monitoring. An FL-150 is not a newsletter signup. If the vendor’s terms let them train a model on your client’s tax return, you have a Rule 1.6 problem that no “AI review” badge will fix.
The architecture that matches those duties is boring and correct: the client enters facts; the lawyer or a supervised paralegal reviews; the lawyer files. A product that lets the client hit “submit to court” has crossed the line that separates lawyer tools from Hello Divorce, DivorceWriter, and Guide & File.
A review-before-file queue, as it actually runs
Online Divorce Lawyer, the work-product tool at FamilyLawyer.software, is one implementation of the pattern — not the only one, and not a substitute for the criteria table above. The vendor’s loop:
- The lawyer creates the client account and assigns the password. Client accounts are not a self-serve consumer mill.
- The client logs into a white-label portal (
yourname.onlinedivorce.lawyer) and completes a help-based interview. Most clients take 30–90 minutes across two or three sessions. That is a vendor claim; it matches what long questionnaires require if they are going to get finished at all. - The client has no download access. When the interview is complete, the client can only notify the firm that the file is ready for review.
- The lawyer or paralegal opens the Download Panel and generates the filing batch — Judicial Council and local county PDFs — then later the service and preliminary-disclosure batch, then the default and judgment batch. Marital settlement agreements come out in Word. The client still cannot push any of that to the court.
That is the ethics-shaped workflow: client does the typing, lawyer does the reviewing, clerk sees a packet that has been through a human who understands Line 11. The vendor also claims all 58 counties, FL-100 and FL-700, $50 per account billed in arrears, first two free, and 36,600-plus uncontested California divorces since 2012. Those are vendor claims. I am not reciting extra form numbers, and I did not perform an independent form-coverage audit. If you want the definition of “plug-and-play” that this architecture is trying to satisfy, it is in the buyer’s checklist.
Should you trust software to fill the FL-150 and FL-142? Trust the parts that enforce one record, current forms, attachments, and a lock the client cannot pick. Do not trust empty-field validation as if it were a cross-examination. The perjury declaration at the bottom of both forms still has your judgment behind it, even when it has the client’s signature on it. Especially then.