News

Nolo.com Finds Technology Partner
Barbara R ther -- 2/5/01

Changing your will on a whim or finding 50 ways to divorce your spouse will soon be as easy as point and click.

Nolo.com of Berkeley, Calif., a leading publisher of self-help law books and the nation's most visited legal information Web site, has entered into a partnership with Rapidocs/Epoch Software Inc. Epoch publishes DesktopLawyer.co.uk, a leading do-it-yourself legal Web site in the U.K. Epoch is also the creator of Rapidocs, a Web-enabled document-assembly system.

According to Epoch's U.S. president Richard Granat and Nolo.com publisher Ralph Warner, combining the publisher's vast legal content with Rapidocs technology will greatly increase Nolo.com's ability to deliver customized legal documents on the Internet. Epoch has also made a strategic investment in Nolo. com.

"The partnership will solve one of the basic difficulties of the self-help legal field, which is the aspect of customization," said Warner. "While Nolo.com has provided online legal help since 1995, the information has been adopted from Nolo books. A person has to sift through various pages to find information that applies to them. Rapidocs is in essence a slicer-dicer that will solve the problem by assisting each user with the specific issues that might apply to their situation and providing exact instructions and forms."

Nolo.com's popular WillMaker software package is an example of this step-by-step user process, but creating separate programs for each of Nolo.com's hundreds of legal books would be prohibitively expensive. Rapidocs will allow Nolo.com to deliver a customizable product like WillMaker for a variety of legal needs.

The first areas to be developed will be small business, divorce, bankruptcy and estate planning; some online products should be available by next month. Depending on their complexity, forms will cost between $10 and $50. "Our expertise has been book publishing, but Epoch entered the self-help legal field as an online product," Warner said, adding, "While our accumulated content database is unsurpassed, Epoch has been able to capture a large percentage of the U.K. market since its debut in 1998. We feel that our knowledge base and their technological insights will be a winning combination."

Founded in 1971, Nolo now has approximately 100 employees and a backlist of almost 200 titles in addition to electronic products.