There are advantages to using a certified legal document preparer instead of, or in conjunction with, an attorney. However, if you do use one, it’s important to understand that there are also a number of limitations. One important limitation is a lack of attorney-client privilege.
Generally, confidential communications with attorneys are protected by privilege. This means that you can go to your attorney and tell him or her things you want to keep secret. Under most circumstances, the secrecy of these communications will be preserved. If an opposing party attempted to subpoena your attorney, your attorney would not typically be required or even allowed to say anything without your consent.
Most people have some sense of this basic concept. It can therefore be tempting to think that if you hire a legal document preparer that your communications with the document preparer are subject to the same kind of privilege. But they aren’t. Thus if you said something to your document preparer that you didn’t want the other side to learn about, and the other side was creative enough to think of issuing a subpoena to the document preparer, the document preparer could be required to disclose what you said.
So if you’ve decided to use a document preparer, for whatever reason, just be extremely careful what you say to him or her, because it could come back to hurt you later on.