Those Sue-It-Yourself Manuals

By Bennett H. Beach

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.

In the eyes of one competitor, Nolo's books are too detailed. "Most of what is available today is designed for either fourth-graders or professionals," says Paul Hasse, 26, a Rhodes Scholar and the founder of Help Abolish Legal Tyranny (HALT) in Washington, B.C. HALT'S guides are aimed at readers between those extremes. In contrast to Nolo, only one member of HALT'S nine-member staff is a lawyer. Supported by $15-a-year dues from 30,000 members, the two-year-old group devotes considerable time to lobbying for legal reforms and lambasting the profession in its newsletter.

If the legal self-counseling movement has a father figure, it is Norman Dacey, a retired estate planner who in 1965 spent $22,000 of his own money to publish How to Avoid Probate! He went door to door to bookstores in his home town, Bridgeport, Conn., and a few copies found their way to Brentano's in New York City, where the book was an instant success. Crown Publishers bought the rights, and Dacey shot to the top of the bestseller lists, ultimately selling 1.5 million copies. He was also No. 1 on many lawyers' hit lists. He was sued by the New York County Lawyers Association, which won an injunction barring further distribution of his book and had him convicted of criminal contempt for the unlawful practice of law. Dacey ultimately vindicated himself and his book on appeal to the state's highest court (his lawyers' fees:, $75,000). Now living in Ireland, Dacey released a thicker version of his manual last spring. He tries not to be bitter. "There are honest lawyers," says he, "just as there are four-leaf clovers."

Many lawyers feel the same way about the competence of self-helping laymen. Most would agree that certain procedures, like changing a name, are simple enough for people to handle on their own. But when it comes to more complicated matters, their views are still summed up in an old proverb: "He that pleads his own cause has a fool for his client." Says San Francisco Attorney Melvin Belli: "If you can take out your own tonsils and deliver your own child, then you shouldn't be concerned about going to court without the aid of a lawyer."

For some bar groups, the self-help message seems to be sinking in. In Chicago, Philadelphia and Kansas City residents can now call a bar-sponsored information line, listen to a tape on a subject like child custody or wills and at the end get a referral number if they want to retain a qualified practitioner. This seems a step in the right direction. But chances are that until attorneys boost their image and lower their fees, many callers will hang up before getting the referral number, and head for their bookstore instead.

--By Bennett H. Beach. Reported by M.E. Wilhelm/Berkeley

With reporting by M.E. Wilhelm

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