About

Why this exists.

Because a friend spent six weeks of her first solo California therapy practice not seeing clients. She was building paperwork.

Specifically: she was reading California statutes and clinical-board guidance, drafting forms from scratch, asking colleagues to review them, redrafting after each round of feedback, and figuring out which of the dozen "free therapist intake template" Google results were actually current and which were five years out of date. By the time she could open her practice door, she'd spent close to a hundred hours on paperwork — at the rate she would have been billing instead, around $8,000 of unpaid time. And she still wasn't sure she'd gotten everything right.

That's the story Practiceletter started inside. The pack is the work product of "what if she had skipped most of that buildout?"

What surprised us

It wasn't the volume of forms that took the time. It was the citations.

Every California document needs to trace back to specific statute. Most "national templates" don't. They cover the lowest-common-denominator language across all fifty states, which means they're technically correct nowhere in particular — and increasingly, California clients and the BBS itself are asking to see where the language came from. A vibes-based informed-consent form holds up until it doesn't.

The citations the average California solo practitioner needs to be able to point to:

Every form in the pack traces back to specific lines in this list. The Adaptation Guide tells you which sections of which documents are anchored to which citation, so when (not if) the law changes, you know where to look.

What we believe about the work

The pack ships ten documents — informed consent for in-person and telehealth, client intake, notice of privacy practices, practice policies, limits of confidentiality, release of information, coordination of care, sliding scale, termination letter, and the No Surprises Act Good Faith Estimate. Those are the deliverable. They're carefully drafted; many clinicians could use them with light customization and be perfectly served.

But the differentiator is the nine-page Adaptation Guide. It walks you through what to customize in each form for your modality, your license type, your client population, and your practice structure. The forms work. The guide is what makes them yours.

Who we are

Practiceletter is built by a small team — currently one person plus an AI operating partner. The work is deliberately bootstrapped (no investors, no venture capital, no growth-at-all-costs incentives). The owner is based in Illinois; the business is owned outright. We have no plans to sell, no plans to pivot to a subscription model, and no plans to bury the templates inside a SaaS that costs more over time than the original purchase.

Our commercial constraint is also our quality constraint: we can only sell what we ourselves would want to buy. If we're not proud of a document, it doesn't ship. If a customer reports something wrong, we fix it for everyone in the next update. If a California statute changes, we revise the affected forms and email every active customer within their 12-month window for free.

Why California first

Doing nine states badly helps nobody. Doing California well first is the wedge. California is the largest single market for licensed therapists in the U.S. (over 100,000 BBS-licensed clinicians) and one of the most regulatorily distinctive — Tarasoff originated here, CMIA is stricter than HIPAA, the No Surprises Act has a California overlay, and SB 801 added specific notice requirements that didn't exist in most other states' equivalents.

Other states next, once California is mature. The pattern repeats; the citations change.

How to reach us

Email support@practiceletter.org — that goes to the founder directly. Questions about the pack, requests for the free Adaptation Guide, comp codes for genuine financial barriers, feedback on a document you bought, ideas for the next state. We read every email.