‘Do-It-Yourself’ Attorneys Go to Press, Not Court

‘We are forced into the very world we were dropping out of.’ --Ralph (Jake) Warner, Nolo Press founder

So you’d like to do your own divorce? Or win a round against your landlord, fight your traffic ticket, declare bankruptcy? Or write your will, form a corporation or change your name? All without hiring a lawyer?

Nolo Press, with 15 years’ experience in teaching do-it-yourself law to more than 1 million readers, may have just the book you need.

Now publishing 47 do-it-yourself law books, Nolo Press has moved from its attic birthplace to a spacious, skylighted former clock factory, has a staff of 19, and expects to gross $2 million this year.

The little anti-Establishment publishing company, founded by a couple of lawyers who wanted to help people fight their simpler court battles without lawyers, has grown up.

“I think, ‘Am I bourgeois?’ We even bought a house!” says co-publisher Toni Ihara, 38. “This business that started out to dismantle the justice system . . . is becoming successful in an Establishment kind of way. I feel a little sheepish.”

“We are forced into the very world we were dropping out of,” added publisher and founder Ralph (Jake) Warner, 44, who has lived as well as worked with Ihara for 15 years and is the father of her 20-month-old daughter, Miya.

“What saves it is the work is good and we have been sort of reasonably consistent,” he said. “We are still bent on self-help, do-it-yourself law. The Establishment thing is more on the side of business. I used to move our stock with a borrowed grocery cart and store it under the bed. I don’t do that anymore.”

“There are times,” Ihara said, “when I think, ‘Oh, if I could only get back to the attic and trade the money for some time in the sun.’ ”

Nolo, a Latin legal term meaning “I do not choose” or “I do not wish,” aptly described the company’s founders, Brooklyn-born and Princeton-educated Warner and UCLA graduate Ed Sherman, who after graduating from the Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, tried unhappily to put their law degrees to work in the Contra Costa Legal Services office.

“Twelve lawyers for 500,000 eligible people is constantly overwhelming. You just sort of burn out,” said Warner, still given to the mid-’60s anti-dress-code uniform of sweat shirts, jeans and Birkenstock sandals.

“And there was just no way Ed and I were going to be lawyers in a firm. It was so boring, and the idea of putting on a white shirt and suit and going into San Francisco every day--we would have been waiters before doing that.”

But they had children to support from former marriages, so the two roommates hung out a shingle. They practiced law two hours a day and spent the rest of the time taking dance classes.

Something to Say

And Sherman wrote a book. Just a little something that grew out of instructions he had drawn up for the Legal Aid secretaries and passed on to eight people who once paid $10 each for a class. Warner was his editor.

That’s how “How to Do Your Own Divorce” came about in 1971.

Sherman made inquiries to a couple of publishers; they thought it was a joke. So he and Warner founded Nolo and published the book themselves. It cost $4.95, and they hand-carried a few copies to a couple of popular bookstores along Telegraph Avenue.

Then they got lucky. Lawyers in the Sacramento Bar Assn. saw the book and pronounced it “dangerous.” It started selling, and so many book distributors called that they had to get a listed phone.

“We always got reams of good publicity,” Warner recalled. “It got to be a joke that when we were short of money we’d try to think of what we could do to bait the Bar.”

Filled a Need

The book, updated as divorce law changes and now tailored for Texas as well as California readers, currently costs $12.95. The company’s all-time best seller, it has run through 13 editions and 39 printings and sold 350,000 copies. It also raised the number of Californians who handle their own divorces, Warner said, from 0.001% to about 40%.

Warner immediately started writing the “Tenants Handbook,” Nolo’s second-best seller at 200,000 copies. Visualizing future books, he developed Nolo’s step-by-step formula, using as his prototype “How to Fix Your Volkswagen,” which “even told you where to find the wrench.”

“I immediately saw,” Warner said, “this was a business and a life. From the beginning, it was part crusade and part having to support ourselves.”

Sherman, 45, a man of eclectic interests who likes to build houses in the wilderness, eventually moved to Victoria, British Columbia, where he writes computer books. He kept the rights to the divorce book and remains close to the Nolo staff.

Assembled a Staff

Warner continued assembling his business family, all of whom were untrained in writing, editing and particularly publishing.

“I was an amateur, but we couldn’t afford to hire publishing experience,” he said. “So I looked around Berkeley and saw all those talented people selling cheese over the counter, and said, ‘Let them do it their own way.’ ”

“If you are intelligent, you can probably accomplish just about anything if you are willing to work hard,” said Barbara Hodovan, 36, who was recruited as Nolo’s controller after she dropped out of nurse’s training and taught herself bookkeeping.

Warner met Ihara when they campaigned for “Berkeley’s first radical City Council slate” and put her to work. A Los Angeles native and Berkeley graduate in anthropology and Italian, she earned a law degree at UC Davis, just to add credibility to her writing. (Ihara, Warner and all the other lawyer-authors continue to pay their California State Bar dues and retain their licenses for the same reason.)

Met in Dance Class

Warner met Keija Kimura, now the graphics director, in an improvisational dance class in 1974. When she said she needed a job, she was put in charge of Nolo publicity.

Carol Pladsen, now associate publisher, was recruited in 1979 when Warner went to his first book convention.

Kate Thill, a teacher at Oakland’s Laney College who dropped out of a Ph.D. program in hydrology at Berkeley, came to Nolo to pack boxes for a couple of weeks during a Christmas rush. Six years later she was marketing director.

John O’Donnell, director of “fulfillment,” or shipping, and a former piano tuner and cabinetmaker now studying marine biology, was lured to Nolo six years ago by a former worker he married. He used Nolo’s best seller to divorce her, but stayed on at the company.

Attracted by the books and the life style, other drop-out lawyers--Stephen Elias, Denis Clifford, Tony Mancuso, Mary Randolph--gravitated to Nolo to write and edit, using their law degrees in their own brand of public interest law.

‘Justice Without Lawyers’

“My cause has changed from being a bleeding heart for everyone with a problem,” said Elias, 44, “to the cause that there should be justice without lawyers.”

Success and respectability have meant adopting business hours, but the workday remains free-form at Nolo. If somebody needs 12 weeks off to go to Europe or a few days to study for an exam, others take up the slack. If a book is nearing publication, everyone stays into the night or the weekend to get it ready. But workaholism is discouraged--40 hours a week is the average--because Nolo staffers believe firmly in life outside work.

Exhibiting that work-and-play style, Ihara and Warner compiled their popular gift book for overly serious lawyers, “29 Reasons Not to Go to Law School,” on a beach in Thailand.

“It is very light-hearted around here,” said O’Donnell. “Somehow three pies arrive and everything grinds to a halt.”

Unusual Place

“Nolo is one of a kind. I never worked in a place like this,” said Randolph, 28, another Boalt Hall law graduate who worked for a law firm in Oregon specializing in land-use before returning to Berkeley last year as a Nolo editor.

“It is a real little community. It is informal and non-hierarchical to the extreme. Everyone is involved in making decisions. Everybody knows what everyone makes and everyone knows how the business is doing. You don’t feel like there is a ‘them’ and an ‘us’ and that you are getting ripped off.”

“I would be making a lot more money as an attorney,” said Randolph, who is paid $25,000 a year, “but the quality of life would go down quite a bit.”

The guiding principle of Nolo Press is not to make huge profits, but to provide the public with helpful information while affording the staff a comfortable living. Some books--like the company’s worst seller with only 3,000 copies, “The Criminal Records Book” which explains how a person can expunge his criminal record--are published, Warner says, not because they will sell a lot of copies, but because they need to be published.

Occasional Bonuses

When times are flush--three or four times a year--Warner distributes $350 to $500 bonuses. When times are lean he asks employees to delay cashing their checks, puts on a coat and tie and goes to the bank to see the loan officers.

Warner currently holds 97% of the private stock after beginning to give shares to employees with five years’ experience.

“It is to enlist their greed,” he explained, “to keep people from thinking I will get rich over this. The stock is basically worthless.” (Hodovan values the stock at $4 a share.)

Salaries range from $14,500 for part-timer Amy Ihara, Toni’s mother and a retired Los Angeles elementary school teacher who runs the company bookstore, to Warner’s $49,600. Ihara gets a $40,000 salary but accepts royalty points on books as partial pay.

Authors receive 8% of the cover price for the first 10,000 copies and 10% after that.

Nolo now publishes six to eight books a year, as well as updating the old ones with changes in the law, and it is venturing into computer software. Its popular new $40 Will-Writer package is expected to bring in more revenue than the best-selling divorce book.

Gets Book Offers

In the beginning, the principals wrote most of the books and conceived the others. Now Nolo attracts five to 10 unsolicited book proposals a week and develops two or three of them a year.

The casual work style at Nolo does not translate to slipshod work. Everything is edited and rewritten as many as 15 times to make sure information is correct and readable.

“You just don’t want to be on the wrong end of the phone when some lawyer calls up and says, ‘You are going to lose your house,’ ” said Warner, who has never had even the threat of a lawsuit over any of his publications.

“We have gotten more persnickety to the point of quasi-insanity because, as our audience grows, from a marketing and an ethical point of view, you really want to be right,” he said. “We have to be way better than the lawyers.”

Lawyers Buy Them

O’Donnell estimates that 20% of Nolo’s regular buyers are lawyers and said that several judges buy Nolo books to obtain up-to-the-minute legal forms and regulations. Law and general reference libraries are another major chunk of the market.

Nolo writers strive to make the legalese readable and leaven their books and quarterly Nolo Press newsletter with illustrated lawyer jokes, such as: “How can you tell if a lawyer is lying? His lips are moving.”

“The material is so dense, we always saw the job as basically one of translating,” Ihara said. “But to get through even our translation, you need a little comic relief.”

Although they have enjoyed twitting the established legal profession, the drop-out attorneys remain careful lawyers, never overestimating their tutoring talents.

“What we can’t do in a book or a computer program is deal with every individual case’s complications,” Warner said. “So every one of our books says, ‘At a certain point, stop and go see a lawyer.’ ”