Every few months ClearNews tells you what's new at Cleardocs. We also send you the monthly ClearLaw with legal updates from our lawyers, Maddocks — helping you be informed about legal developments relevant to the documents we provide. Christopher Balmford

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This month's ClearNews

Estate planning training for advisers — University and Financial Planning Association accreditation

Cleardocs is developing a range of online estate planning document packages. Professional advisers — especially Members of the Financial Planning Association — who are interested in helping clients with estate planning are likely to be interested in new estate planning courses — which the Cleardocs estate planning document packages will support.

In developing our range of estate planning document packages, Cleardocs is working with representatives and partners of Estplan Pty Ltd. Estplan provides a 2 day estate planning course for professional advisers — with the option to go on and complete the last 4 days of the 6 day undergraduate estate planning subject at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS). Any adviser:

• who completes the 2 day course, receives an Estplan General Practitioners Certificate — they are also entitled (on conditions UTS sets and as long as they are not a current UTS student) to progress to the 6 day course; and
• who completes the UTS 6 day course, earns a UTS certificate of completion of the subject. If the adviser is a member of the Financial Planning Association (FPA), then they are eligible to work toward an FPA specialist designation of "Accredited Estate Planning Strategist".

The courses are in all capital cities and can be customised for, and delivered in, your organisation.

Although it will be some time before Cleardocs launches estate planning documents, we wanted you to know about this Estplan course to help you prepare.

For more information about Estplan, see http://www.estplan.com.au

HR policy manual launched

On 8 April 2010, we launched our first Employment & HR document — an HR Policy and Procedures Manual. The HR Manual helps employers:

• to set high standard work practises in their organisation; and
• to manage the day-to-day HR and staff issues that arise even in a small business.

The Manual is available on an annual subscription of $99. The subscription entitles you to all updates for 12 months from the date you ordered.

When we update the Manual to reflect a change in the law or best practice, we will send you:

• the up-to-date version of your organisation's, or your client's, Manual; and
• draft emails to review and tailor for the employer to send to its staff to tell them about the changes.

We have worked with the HR consultancy CrossroadsHR to make sure the Manual is practical.

As always, our master documents and interface etc. are signed-off by our lawyers at Maddocks.

Both Maddocks and CrossroadsHR provide a free 5 minute helpline in relation to the HR Policy Manual. If you need to use either helpline, call us on 1300 307 343, and we will arrange for you to speak with the relevant person.

The Manual contains policies to help you efficiently:

• deal with staff sickness and absence — including long-term sickness
• handle disciplinary procedures
• handle staff grievances
• manage all types of leave — including maternity and paternity leave
• set policies about remuneration and expenses.

For the full table of contents, including a set of HR forms, click here

For more information, click here

To order an HR Policy Manual, click here

Your brand and design automatically on covers of packages you order with printing and binding

You can include your logo and branding etc., on the covers of the binders, deeds, and constitutions etc. you order from Cleardocs.

To set up the service, email us at support@cleardocs.com. We'll send you a brief about how to email us attachments of the binder cover, and the document cover, with the logo, branding and layout you want.

When you've approved the covers, our printer and binding provider On-Demand will arrange your covers for all your printing and binding orders from Cleardocs.

New signing clauses: Change of SMSF trustee, and SMSF borrowing both for a bank lender and related party

As part of updating the signing clauses we use in our documents, we have now updated the document packages for Change of SMSF Trustee and for SMSF borrowing (bank and related party). The document packages for SMSF set up and for Update to SMSF deed were done late in 2009.

We are updating the signing clauses for all our documents. This change is a result of feedback from banks. Even though our existing signing clauses are legally effective, we are making the change to improve efficiency for our customers when dealing with banks. This change will remove reference to signing by an authorised person from our interface.

The new format is now in place for our Unit Trust, Discretionary Trust, Self Managed Superannuation Fund Trust deed, Update to SMSF deed, Change of SMSF Trustee and SMSF borrowing both for a bank lender and a related party lender.

Look out for these changes in our other documents in the coming months.

Recent Cleardocs Blog articles

Our Blog has recently covered these topics:

• Careful about changing a Discretionary Trust, Hybrid Trust — even just changing trustee
• The banks and SMSF borrowing: remember the bank is acting for itself — not for the SMSF trustee(s)
• Launch your company into cyberspace
• Building assets right from the start — a trade mark is part of it

• Recent Cleardocs Blog articles

Hints and tips on using Cleardocs

Arrange for other people in your firm to receive legal update newsletters, invoices, or document packages ordered

You can easily arrange for our system to automatically send:

• the legal update newsletter ClearLaw, to other advisors, partners, principals etc. in your firm;
• invoices, to someone in your accounts department; and
• the documents you order, to you or to someone else.

To arrange for our system to automatically send our legal updates, invoices, or documents to other people:

1. Go to www.cleardocs.com
2. Log in — top-right-hand corner
3. Click "My profile" just below the red box near the top on the left-hand side
4. Scroll to the bottom
5. Under "Additional contacts" you will see these three boxes.

   Receive	Full name	Email
   Invoice Documents News

6. In the left hand box, select "News", "Invoices" or "Documents". In the other boxes, type in the relevant person's name and email address
7. Click "Add" at the end to add more rows for as many people as you need to add.
8. Click "Save" at the bottom.

That's it. Easy.

Merge one or more Usernames into one firm-wide Username

Some professional firms have more than one Username registered with Cleardocs. Although that's fine by us, it can be inefficient for the firm.

If you'd like to merge one or more Usernames so that all the firm's documents are in one place, just let us know. We can do it in a few minutes. To merge the Usernames, we just need an email from each one. If some of the email addresses are no longer in use, then call us — we'll work it out.

Best Regards

The Cleardocs Team
www.cleardocs.com