About: Tomek Pilch

Are you tired of being a lawyer, but still want to use that fancy law degree, expensive education, and valuable legal expertise? We want that big brain of yours! At Nolo, we are always on the lookout for talented, experienced attorneys to help us with our mission of bringing plain English legal information to the masses.

What We Do

Publish, publish, publish. We have a dozen in-house editors who are tasked with writing, editing and updating Nolo’s award winning library of plain English self-help legal books, online and boxed software applications, and legal forms.

In addition, we operate Nolo.com and other legal sites in the Nolo Network. With so many questions to answer, we wind up writing thousands of articles every month, and we can only keep up with the help of our contributing authors. This is where you come in.

Who Are Our Contributing Authors?

These fine people – Practicing attorneys, retired lawyers, paralegals, recent law school grads, JDs working in other fields, and everything in between. We have found that the freedom and flexibility offered by this position appeals to a wide array of legal experts who want to use their skill, experience, and education, but don’t want to commit to a full-blown law career.

How’s it Work?

Our contributing authors work closely with our team of editors to add to and/or update our massive library of legal articles, Q&A’s and legal resource content. We use a platform developed and managed by Internet Brands to streamline the whole process, from idea, to published article, to payment.

This is all done over the internet, so the work is available to the right person, anywhere in the U.S.

Who We’re Looking For

If you’re interested in writing for Nolo, you can always find open positions at IBPublishing.com. As I write this, I know:

• Mary Randolph and Betsy Simmons Hannibal want talent in the area of estate planning and administration.
• Janet Portman needs experts in the field of criminal law.
• Ilona Bray is looking for practicing immigration attorneys to write on the complex and ever-changing area of immigration.
• Beth Laurence could use a hand covering issues of disability and workers compensation, as well as Medicaid.
• Marcia Stewart, along with Ilona, needs real estate experts.
• Kathleen Michon is always in need of help with the debt & bankruptcy area as well as foreclosure.
• David Goguen, who covers accidents and personal injury law, needs all the help he can get.
• If you’re a tax or business expert, Diana Fitzpatrick would like to hear from you.
• Lina Guillen would love help in the areas of divorce, child support, child custody, adoption, and everything else family law.

What Else You Should Know

Nolo has a hard-earned reputation for delivering the best quality, plain English, legal information available anywhere. Our editorial team is, well, very picky. Our contributing authors find that there is an initial learning curve, and the first few submissions often go back and forth between writer and editor before final approval. So, be prepared for, and open to, some criticism. Get ready to be a better writer.

We’ve spent the last few months building out a brand new, robust Debt Management section on Nolo. We’ve covered the gamut; like tips on dealing with overwhelming debt, when and how you might be able settle some of your debt, and who can garnish your wages. We’ve also got great information on more serious debt collection techniques like creditor lawsuits and repossessions.

If you’re struggling with debt, start here to learn about your options.

Back in the day, Google’s motto was, “Don’t Be Evil.” The company grew tremendously because they offered something that was lacking online: A way to find information quickly. Lately though, I find their offering to be diminuted by their need to generate revenue. This infographic by Wordstream highlights the fact that Adwords ads dominate search results for keywords with “high commercial intent”. Whether the results are accurate or not, it has no doubt become obvious that Google is now solely responsible to shareholders, not users; just do a search for “credit cards.” I have a big screen, and it’s still eaten up by ads and Google Offers. Additionally, Google’s ads are becoming harder to distinguish from organic results. The background color of ads has changed many times over the past decade, and is now a pink that renders white on most screens. Searchers don’t even realize that they’re clicking on an ad, not a search result.

I always use my brother as a case study of “Joe Internet User”. I’m surrounded by tech savvy people that know how the internet works, so I need a “layman” to understand how everyone else uses the web. My brother starts his web experience by searching Google for the url he wants. Yes, he Googles “www.facebook.com” to get to facebook. When I watch him search for something, he invariably clicks on the first ad. He lands on a page selling something, then clicks back. I always get the, “wait, I know it’s here somewhere” line. Then he goes on to other ads until he finds what he’s looking for. Then I get the, “check this out” line. Google’s earned $0.50 and the publisher of the great content has earned who knows what. Accidental ad clicks? You bet. Money well spent.

Now, I understand that the Google is a public company and they have to constantly grow earnings, but given how integral they’ve become in our internet life, it seems wrong somehow to deviate from what made them so great pre-IPO: finding things online. Wordstream’s data suggests that they are more a servicer of highly targeted ads than a killer search engine.

I don’t want to buy traffic from Google, but I may not have a choice. Nolo has got 13 expert editors, 70+ freelance lawyers, and forty years of experience creating the best legal content available, but it may not be an economical business anymore. When it costs an average of $120 per page to produce just a simple article, and the only people finding it are coming from Google at an eight percent click-through rate (even though we rank number one), the potential conversion just doesn’t make it possible.

What if we could no longer afford to offer free legal information?

It’s been well over a year since Panda 2.0 rolled out and Google traffic to one of our sites, DisabilitySecrets.com, was halved. Admittedly, DisabilitySecrets was undeservedly getting a lot of love from The Google.

For a quick peak, take a look at the graph. Read on for more detail.

This is a site that we acquired in 2010 from a former Social Security Disability examiner. While it did have plenty of unique, useful content, it also had thousands of thin quality pages that contained a lot of boilerplate text, and many thousands of pages with very little unique content, all of which ranked fairly well.

After Panda rolled out, we realized we had a lot of work to do to get the site’s content up to Nolo standards.

The first thing we did was start cutting out the poor quality and duplicative content, in an effort to minimize the site footprint in Google’s index. This also reduced the number of pages that our editor and writers would need to tackle.

It took us about two months of organizing and redirecting before we could boil the content down to the meat and move it on to editorial.

After that, our own Beth Laurence went to work. She spent months researching, editing content, recruiting freelancers with the necessary experience, and organizing all the information into a new taxonomy. This process, which continues today, took about six months before nearly all of the content had been addressed. Most of it had to be rewritten completely, but some was salvaged with only minor edits.

The focus was twofold. Beth and her team were responsible for the content quality, as well as user engagement metrics. We wanted to reduce our bounce rate, improve visitor time on site, and make sure our visitors weren’t clicking back to other search results.

It took nearly a year of work from both the SEO team and editorial before we finally starting seeing the fruits of our labor. The first quarter of this year was the “bounce back”.  As you can see in the graph below, Panda is quick to take away your traffic, and slow to give it back. At this point though, we are at higher traffic levels than ever, and continuing to grow.

The real benefit, though, is for our users. Panda forced us to dig in and really build a better site.

We’re giving away free forms! Every month, we’ll make a few forms inNolo’s Online Legal Store available for free. This month we’re giving away an Affidavit of Domicile and a Bill of Sale for Dog. Both of these forms can be found on our Free Legal Forms page.

We believe that everyone needs access to high quality, legally enforceable forms for a wide variety of everyday situations. Nolo’s legal forms were written by our team of in-house expert attorneys, so you can count on them to be accurate, legally binding and easy to use. All of our forms also come with detailed, Plain English instructions, so you can clearly understand all of the legal terms and jargon involved.

Now, you can get some of our forms for free,

so you can see for yourself

just how helpful they can be.