Law: Those Sue-It-Yourself Manuals

How-to books are booming as laymen seek to bypass lawyers

"I thank you, my mother thanks you, I and my girlfriend thanks you." So wrote a satisfied reader of How to Do Your Own Divorce in California to the book's publisher, Nolo Press. The happily divorced man is one of millions of Americans who have found that a likely place to seek solutions to their legal problems is often the neighborhood bookstore. Self-help manuals are proliferating, usually in paperback, and cover every subject from small-claims court to homosexual rights. Nolo, with 20 titles in print, expects to gross $750,000 this year, up $500,000 from 1978. An estimated 50 other publishers throng the field, ranging from giant, Canada-based International Self-Counsel Press (100 titles for a $1 million annual gross) to underground-style newsletters with circulations of less than a thousand. There is scant mystery about the forces underlying this boom. "People just don't know what their rights are," says American Bar Association Spokesman Richard Collins, "and they are scared to go to attorneys because they have no idea what they're getting into." Looking at it another way, people have all too good an idea of what they are getting into: a financial minefield. With an attorney's time now commanding $40 to $150 an hour, potential clients often fear, correctly, that fees will outrun any gain they might hope for by taking legal action. At $5 to $10 a copy, a how-to guide strikes many as the wiser investment. Other factors in the books' popularity: the post-Watergate tarnishing of lawyers' credibility and a general desire by people to take a greater role in matters that affect them intimately.

Nolo was founded in 1971 in a brown shingled house in Berkeley. Two Berkeley Law School graduates, Ralph Warner and Charles Sherman, emotionally and financially drained after three years as poverty lawyers, teamed up on a manual designed to take advantage of California's simplified divorce procedures. The result was How to Do Your Own Divorce in California, which has since sold 300,000 copies and may have saved its readers as much as $80 million in legal fees. Another big seller is California Tenants' Handbook (85,000 copies), which drew this letter from a disgruntled landlord: "I have just read your fascinating book and have put [my wife's and my] duplexes up for sale. We can't survive with all those lawsuits you promote." The guides have produced relatively few suits; most readers use them as an aid to routine, non-courtroom procedures.

With prosperity, Nolo has moved to larger quarters in a converted clock factory but retains its raffish, blue-jeans style. The staff, which works amid cantaloupe-crate bookshelves and suspended Chinese kites, has expanded to 17 (including an artist-lawyer, an anthropologist, and the stand-in for Toshiro Mifune in the TV series Shogun). To keep pace with changing laws, they regularly issue updated editions, and recently published a sort of Whole Earth Catalog of the law called The People's Law Review.