Tag Archives: Nolo Authors

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.

Whether it’s How to Form an LLC in Texas, California DUI Laws, The Florida Homestead Exemption Laws, or any of the other thousands of accurate legal articles in the Nolo network, there’s a lot of legal research behind it. So how do we manage so much legislative information and translate it into plain English for our readers?

Early on, Nolo had to come up with some way to organize and maintain a wealth of state specific information for all the charts that appear in Nolo’s books. More recently, that need grew even more as online publishing ramped up. The solution was a unique, proprietary editorial database that allows our editors and researchers to manage all of this information. They can create dynamic charts of state based statutes that can easily be updated when the laws change.

This research is often done in advance of large writing projects that are handled by our freelancers. This way we can produce large volumes of content without the risk of inaccurate information.

This is just another example of the lengths to which we go to produce the best legal content online. Where most online publishers simply use other sites for their research (often Nolo.com), we go straight to the source.

SEO is a tricky business; just when you think you know everything, the game changes, and you’re back where you started.  It’s important not only to be plugged in to current changes in the SEO landscape, but to be able to bounce ideas off of others.

The SEO Team at Nolo has taken this idea to the next level; 4/5′s of us currently share a 12×15 room.  That’s 80% of us crammed into one, tiny 180 sq. ft. space.  Oh, and the windows don’t open, either.

You would think this would drive us a bit insane and, well, you’d be right about that.  But there have been some advantages to our new location, the foremost being how easy it is for us to spitball ideas with each other.

Managing the thousands of pages on Nolo and Nolo affiliated sites is a balancing act between filling them with as much information as possible and keeping them user friendly.  There are times when the design of the page is nearly more important than the content (“nearly” being key there; content is king here at Nolo).  But not everyone has the same idea about what looks good and what doesn’t.

It’s helpful to have other eyes near by that can look at your screen and give you immediate feedback.  Granted, that feedback generally ends up being things like “why does that look so horrible?” or “did you break all the sites?” but it’s all taken in the good humor that it’s meant (usually).  Besides, that’s just the first round of commentary.  From there it breaks down into a constructive discussion of what works on a specific page and what doesn’t.  There are some days when we spend nearly as much time talking about the sites as we do actually changing them.

Being in the same room together is also particularly helpful if one of us happens to accidentally hit a button we shouldn’t hit, like, say, changing an entire section of every single one of our pages.  It’s nice to have back up who can come to your aid as soon as you realize that you’ve done something you regret.  It’s a position we’ve all been in (okay, fine, all of us but Tomek).

The collaborative process that goes on in this room is something of a microcosm for Nolo as a whole.  We are nothing if not the sum of our parts.  From the talented editors who guide our content, to our stable of writers who put cursor to screen, there are a lot of people involved in making Nolo as great as possible.

If we have to sit a foot and a half away from each other to make that happen, then so be it.

But, please, someone send fans — it’s broiling in here!

As part of our legal content production, we use quite a few outside authors. We have to use expert freelance authors to publish reliable legal information at the scale that Nolo does. These freelancers are mostly lawyers, but we do occasionally use non-lawyer authors, such as paralegals or other professionals.
In order to ensure that we employ only the most qualified writers, each candidate has to pass a test in the area of law they wish to write about. Each test is conceived by the editor for that particular area.

What We Look For

The most basic, critical skill we look for is the ability to take a piece of legislation or legal jargon, digest it, and translate it into plain English. It’s at the core of what Nolo does; make law accessible to everyone. Our authors must be able to explain intricate, nuanced legal concepts in such a way that any layperson can easily understand it.
While this may sound simple, it’s a skill we have found incredibly difficult to recruit for.
Many people that apply to write for Nolo write very well, and are incredibly knowledgeable about the law, but they can’t explain the topic in plain English. There are plenty of sites out there, government and private, that publish legal information that most people just can’t (or don’t want to) read. It seems many competent law experts just can’t let go of their education and training and discuss a legal topic in language that everyone can “get”.

Want to Give it a Shot?

If you’ve got legal experience and want to apply to be a Nolo writer, go to www.knowledgewriting.com, sign up and choose from one of the legal categories. You’ll need to provide a writing sample and test which will then be screened by one of our editors.