Legal Guide for Starting & Running a Small Business

This is definately not a book you'll curl up with in your reading chair and read, but it is definatly a good book to have. The forms are not as narrow as the title of the book suggests. It talks about legal forms for starting and running a small business, but since it seems to cover every possible eventuality of owning a small business including buying land, buildings, goods, leases, partnerships, loans, etc. It would however fail to be much of a book if it were all sample forms (of which there are many). What makes the book useful is a fully catagorize set of chapters that each explains the category of forms found post chapter. It's nice to see the paper copies of the forms, but so you don't use them all up, it has a CD that has all the forms in easy to fill in electronically and fill out to sign and use. One of the nicer things about the text of the chapters is all the tips and hints of what to document when you do these forms. For instance in the lease section they mention to watch out for how the landlord measures the space. Some measure from the center wall, while others even start at the outside walls, counting the wall thickness in the calculation making you pay for a whole lot of unused space. Useful tidbits like this are in gray highlighted panels so they look like something the reader needs to check out before moving on. One more really helpful thing is all the sample lines put in the form filling explaination. How many times have you read a form, and not known what that fill-in blank is looking for? If you could just see an example someone else used you'd know, and thats what this book provided in hundreds of cases. So what else is there that's useful in this book? Well, when you have a book you are gonna use as a reference, as you build a small business to take care of all your documentation duties, a good look-up section is a must. You can read the form categories in the table of context, but this book took the time to make a comprehensive index so if you can think of a topic this book covers, you can look it up there and find the page faster. I'm not starting a business, but I have use for many of these forms, so I recommend this book to cover a lot of everyday legal and document needs. Plus given the forms were made to be designed as legal documents, they may one day bail you out of a bad "gentleman's" agreement I know a lot of people get into and later regret. It's amazing what different ideas two people can walk away from a bargaining table thinking, and they only diverge more as time goes by. Fix it right get it in writing!

This book is very easy to use. I prepared all of our corporate docs in no time at all. Has employment form and miscellaneous contracts. Only thing missing is a sample of a share certificate. This is a great book for small corporations.

I found this book very useful with lots of very valueable info. The authors have done a good job here. I think that everyone interested in starting their own business should read it. I'd also like to suggest that you read Untapped Wealth Discovered by Jeff N Marquis and Kerry J Harrison. This book gives a fresh new approach to starting different types of small businesses and shows you how to avoid those false promises and get rich quick schemes. Both editions are very insightful.

Now in a newly updated and expanded third edition, Legal Forms For Starting & Running A Small Business is a comprehensive resource packed with forms for getting a business off the ground, borrowing money, hiring employees, creating contracts, buying or leasing space, and much more. Legal Forms For Starting & Running A Small Business balances its wealth of reproducible documents with straightforward "how-to" instructions and advice, a new checklist to help first-timers, and an accompanying Windows and Mac compatible CD-ROM makes printing out the forms a breeze. An easy-to-use "must-have" for small business owners and managers everywhere.

Nolo's Legal Guide to Starting and Running a Small Business was exactly what I needed to help start my company off on the right foot. I don't have a very strong legal backround and would have been way over my head if I'd tried to forge ahead totally alone but at the same time I didn't want to spend a fortune consulting a lawyer. If you're in a similar situation then Nolo's Legal Guide is the perfect solution. It is well written, well organized, thorough, and very easy to use. It's a great general start-up kit that would be helpful to any fledgling business that I can think of. If I had had to call a lawyer to answer every legal question that arose in the first couple of months (a huge number) then my company may easily have never gotten off the ground. I was so pleased with this product that I have since purchased two more Nolo books (Tax Savvy for Small Business and The Employer's Legal Handbook) that are more directed at business owners who have gotten through the initial start-up phase. Both of these books are also excellent and I would recommend them as follow ups to the Legal Guide to Starting and Running a Small Business.