Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company The New York Times

August 24, 1998, Monday, Late Edition - Final Correction Appended

 
Within the rebellious corporate culture of Nolo Press, the publisher of do-it-yourself legal guides, scorn is a business tool mightier than any conventional marketing strategy.

The airy clockworks factory that houses the company here is decorated with fashionable "legal briefs," baggy boxer shorts emblazoned with briefcase-toting sharks and toasters declaring the defiant company motto: "Don't feed the lawyers. Just say Nolo."

Its warren of offices is inhabited by self-described recovering lawyers and white-shoe refugees who write and publish guides to the mysteries of the legal world -- from preparing a will or seeking a divorce to fighting a traffic ticket or muzzling a neighbor's barking dog.

For 27 years, Nolo has thrived on unrestrained hostility to pettifoggers. The desks of some Nolo executives contain treats of shark-shaped gummy lawyers, and the company's award-winning Web site features a running list of lawyer jokes classified in 20 categories ranging from "Outrageous Fees" to "Lawyers as Crooks, Cheats and Felons."

This corporate philosophy has given Nolo a ready warrior's rhetoric in a rare turf battle that pits Nolo's irreverent founder and publisher, Ralph Warner -- a firm believer in "every man his own lawyer" -- against a group of Texas lawyers who compare the legal craft in some respects to brain surgery.

The lawyers are volunteers on special subcommittees anointed by the Supreme Court of Texas to investigate and stamp out what is formally called the unauthorized practice of law. "I don't believe there's a constitutional right to practice law in the state of Texas," said Mark A. Ticer, the lawyer who is chairman of the Dallas subcommittee. "As a general premise, everybody should have access to the legal system, but the question is: What are the rules and guidelines?"

Most often the targets of the subcommittees are advice-giving paralegals, who face the committee members in closed-door hearings, which determine whether the lawyers will unleash lawsuits against offenders. But in June of last year, one of the volunteer lawyers from the Houston subcommittee sent a certified letter to Nolo notifying the company that its products were the subject of an investigation.

A handful of other publishers were also investigated, including Parsons Technology of Iowa, a unit of Broderbund Software Inc., which was eventually sued in Federal court by the lawyers to halt sales of its Quicken Family Lawyer software. That lawsuit is still pending, as are the hearings for other publishers, like E-Z Legal Forms Inc., which are keenly awaiting the fate of Nolo, a relatively small company with sales of $9.5 million a year.

Despite its size, though, Nolo has remained true to its Latin name -- which means "I do not choose to" n by becoming the lead scrapper in the dispute. The investigating committee demanded general information about the company's products, in particular its $49.95 Living Trust Maker guidebook and software, which allows users to create living trusts without paying a lawyer's fee.

That demand, couched in lawyerly language, was tantamount to inviting free-speech protesters to man the barricades at Sproul Plaza at the University of California at Berkeley.

After all, Nolo was created by two former legal aid lawyers, one of whom dreamed of creating a credit-card operated machine that spewed out do-it-yourself forms for any legal emergency. It is a company so egalitarian that the list of all staff salaries is posted on the office bulletin board and employees are permitted to bring pets to work as long as they do not have fleas.

"We're just not going to knuckle under," Mr. Warner vowed from his vacation retreat in the south of France. "People have the right to legal information."

A Princeton graduate and a legal aid lawyer in the 1960's, Mr. Warner, 57, and a partner, Charles Sherman, started the company in 1971 in a Berkeley attic after the two failed to persuade any New York editors to publish their typewritten manuscript "How to Do Your Own Divorce in California." Their early books -- which were more like pamphlets n were essentially inspired by the questions of people who were turned away from the legal aid offices with incomes too high to qualify for help and too low to afford a private lawyer, Mr. Warner said.

Eventually, Nolo expanded its list of offerings to do-it-yourself guidebooks on tenant rights, bankruptcy, patents, wills and adoptions. If a barking dog was nagging the neighborhood, Nolo offered an extensive handbook on dog law. If a lawyer's fee was outrageous, Nolo offered a "Mad at Your Lawyer?" handbook with constructive suggestions for channeling the anger. It also offered a guide for sealing criminal records, although Mr. Warner said he drew the line at a handbook for defending first-degree murderers.

Unlike traditional trade publishers, the company hired in-house lawyers who not only edited the legal books but could write their own guides and update them in plain, concise English.
 
The company's distributors initially faced reluctance from booksellers to stock the books because of fears that the material could present legal problems even though do-it- yourself legal publishing, which flourished in the 18th and 19th centuries in America, has a long history. "The whole concept of self-help law was so Californian that we were fighting the perception that it was somehow trouble or bad advice," said Charles Winton, chief executive of Publishers Group West, the former distributor for Nolo.

In the late 1980's, Nolo started offering a guidebook with software called "Willmaker" that suddenly shifted the company into a new stratosphere, doubling its revenue and allowing the company to increase its staff to its current size of 80 people. The $39.95 Willmaker software, which remains the company's top-selling product with more than 570,000 copies in print, is Nolo's dominant revenue producer.

The software seems to pose the greatest threat to lawyers, said Stephen R. Elias, the associate publisher at Nolo and a former legal aid lawyer, who noted that it was much easier and efficient to prepare a basic will with software than a handbook. Mr. Elias said that the company had never received a consumer complaint from anyone in Texas about its software, which is why he takes a more cynical view of the investigation of Nolo's products. "We are dealing with foxes who are in charge of the chicken coop," said Mr. Elias, who said that the entire network of Texas subcommittees was simply the "court's way of enforcing the attorneys' monopoly."

Since Nolo was first notified about the Texas investigation, Mr. Elias has exchanged increasingly curt letters with the Texas lawyers arguing that Nolo provides affordable legal information that is fully protected by the First Amendment.

These are familiar arguments that are not generally compelling to subcommittee members like Jeffrey A. Lehmann, a Houston lawyer who argues that law should have the same regulations as medicine. "If a person gave you power of attorney to do brain surgery," he said, "do you think the Texas board would let you do it?"

Particularly bothersome to Mr. Ticer, the Dallas subcommittee chairman, is that company books and software have a stamp of authority and legitimacy. "Now what happens to the person who uses that and uses the will form and discovers that the I.R.S. has come in
and taken more than they've got?" he said. Mr. Ticer suggests that even without such materials people representing themselves have access to the legal system by going to a law library where they can "pull up legal research and treatises on family law."

Mr. Ticer complained that the lawyers on the committee had been unfairly turned into whipping boys and portrayed as protectionists. But the image is an enduring one for some users of Nolo's guides like Thomas D. Russell, a legal historian and law professor at the University of Texas in Austin. "Writing a will is not brain surgery," he said. "And living trusts simply are not as complicated as lawyers want them to be. Obviously that's a lucrative business, and the lawyers resent that people can do it on their own. I think that lawyers who oppose Nolo Press simply have to face the fact that if software can do a lawyer's job, we don't need the lawyer."

Although Nolo Press and its Texas lawyers have raised the more glamorous arguments about First Amendment protections, the dispute has devolved into a debate about the guidelines and rules of the Texas subcommittees. The hearing on Nolo's publications has been delayed because the Texas Supreme Court has scheduled its own Oct. 21 hearing to listen to Nolo Press's challenge of guidelines governing the committees.

Nolo's executives are clearly relishing the battle, which they estimate could cost up to $100,000 in legal fees because obviously there is no do-it-yourself handbook to cover a Texas-size legal tiff.

Mr. Warner, Nolo's founder, said that the entire tempest gave him new revolutionary energy. "I've been doing this for a long time," he said. "And every five years I do think about how to change my life, how does it stay interesting. And this is something that has personally got me interested."

CORRECTION-DATE: August 26, 1998, Wednesday

CORRECTION: Because of an editing error, an article in Business Day on Monday about Nolo Press, the legal publisher, misidentified one of the promotional items that carry the company's motto. It is posters, not toasters.