Success At Nolo Press

It's the formula for California's success-story cliche: Take an iconoclastic entrepreneur, add a garage, stir in some zeal, sprinkle imagination--and presto, out comes a world-changing technology. That's almost the story of Ralph "Jake" Warner, the founder and president of Berkeley-based Nolo.com Inc., the nation's largest publisher of legal self-help books. Well, O.K.--Warner launched the company from his attic, and, it being 1971, the motive was more politics than profit, and he didn't invent a technology. But the product sure changed at least a corner of the world: Warner brought the consumer movement to the hidebound practice of law. His little startup smashed the Establishment firms' lock on legal advice to become a $9.5 million company over the next 28 years, first by telling ordinary folk how to avoid lawyers for routine work such as wills and more recently by doing the same for small-business owners. Meanwhile, Warner and his team have maintained their focus and philosophy with remarkable consistency, even as Nolo moves onto the Web and Warner, its sole owner, grows more intrigued by the idea of major expansion.

Swimming with sharks. Today, with myriad self-help Web sites and books available, the do-it-yourself concept seems like a no-brainer. But in 1971, drafting your own partnership agreement made as much sense to most people as taking out your own appendix. Warner, a former Legal Aid lawyer from Berkeley, knew better--most legal work isn't surgery. So Warner started with a book on do-it-yourself divorce that he tried to sell to New York publishers. "I kept getting blank stares," he recalls. "One guy thought his brother-in-law was playing a practical joke."