This section covers how to find transactional law materials and highlights some contract drafting resources. 

• Precedents are agreements and contracts that have previously been used in other transactions. Precedents can save you time by allowing you to avoid starting from scratch when drafting your own documents, but you must review the precedents carefully to ensure accuracy and shape them to your facts. 
• Checklists and timelines identify key legal issues and considerations to help ensure you are not overlooking important tasks in a transaction.
• Practice notes are written by practitioners and provide how-to guidance and explanations of legal concepts or topics. 

Form Collections

Bloomberg Law also provides access to two collections of forms: ALI-ABA Forms Library and BNA Sample Forms. Bloomberg Law no longer provides access to PLI (Practising Law Institute) publications, but these materials can now be found through PLI Plus (see below). 

Form Finder

Westlaw's Form Finder allows you to browse and search for forms by state or topic. These forms come from formbooks such as American Jurisprudence Legal Forms 2d and Nichols Cyclopedia of Legal Forms Annotated, as well as from topical treatises and texts. 

This collection also includes litigation, civil, and criminal forms, so the best way to search this database for transactional forms is to use the Advanced Search: Form Finder. The advanced search permits you to limit your results to include only transactional forms. 

Practical Law

Practical Law provides access to standard documents and clauses, checklists, and how-to guides (Practice Notes) written by and frequently updated by West attorney-editors. You can browse content by practice area, resource type, or jurisdiction, or search across the database. 

Forms

Lexis Advance: Forms provides access to forms that you can browse by state or practice area. The Advanced Search: Forms will allow you to search for keywords in just the title of the document. 

Practice Advisor

Lexis Practice Advisor contains practical guidance from practitioners. You can browse content by practice area, content type, and jurisdiction. Similar to Westlaw Practical Law, Lexis Practice Advisor also contains practice notes, forms, clauses, and checklists. 

PLI Plus provides access to Practising Law Institute Press treatises, course handbooks, answer books, journals, and transcripts of programs. Use the keyword searchable database to search across all forms that appear in PLI’s publications. Forms can be downloaded in Word format. 

Practicing in Illinois? IICLE SmartBooks provide access to practice guides in various substantive areas of Illinois law, covering topics such as banking and finance, corporate and commercial law, and business law. Browse the table of contents of a practice guide to view a list of forms available in that guide. Forms can be downloaded in Rich Text Format.