It has been a long, exhausting road on this book. It was written, rewritten, and then almost completely scrapped and started again.

Legal research is an incredibly dry topic and is hard to explain in a book format. Most law schools insist that this be one of the first classes you take, but the textbook is either non-existent or not used.

To prepare for this one I bought a number of books by other publishers to see what  they covered and how they covered it.  I quickly found that in a 300 page book there might be 30 pages of usable material. All the rest of it was exercises, blank pages for exercises, and, to be honest, bullshit.

If you are representing yourself and have legal research questions, what you need is a basic knowledge of what the terms mean and then a place you can do the research. You don't care about how they did legal research in England in the 1600s, you don't care about how it used to be done, and you don't need a lot of extra pages to get in the way of the information.

I usually am a "putter inner" when I write a book. I write it and then go back and add things that I think might be interesting. In this case I took the opposite approach and cut, cut, cut.

What we ended up with is a book on legal research that is designed for people who are not lawyers.  You don't have all day to mess with unimportant information and that provides a good concept of where to do the research.

I am pretty proud of the end product and think it is the best guide to legal research that is available today. If you are looking for a book with lots of pages, this isn't it. If you are looking for a book with lots of important information, we have that book.

Is it perfect? Noting is perfect. If you purchase the Guerrilla Guide to Legal Research: Finding the Law for Non-Lawyers and think that something is missing, drop us an email and I will add a section or make edits to cover that area and then send you a copy of the updated book free.

Using this guide you will have access to the same cases and the same statutes that the lawyers have access to, but for free! This will allow you to do research on your own, at no cost, and when it is convenient for you. In addition, the book is filled with tips and warnings about what people do wrong when doing their research, allowing you to avoid mistakes that are embarrassing at best and can be fatal to your case at worst.

As usual, the Guerrilla Guides are only available in an ebook format so that we can keep the costs down. It is available at Amazon.com for the Kindle and RebellionBooks.com for the PDF (which allows printing).  It is not necessary to actually purchase one of these e-readers, these formats have readers available for your computer at no charge.

The Introduction to the book explains the purpose behind this volume as well as why many people can represent themselves in a car wreck settlement and save on attorney's fees while getting the best settlement possible.

INTRODUCTION

Are you going to know as much as an attorney about car wreck cases when you finish this book?

 Probably not, or at least not as much as most attorneys who do a lot of car wreck cases. Attorneys spend at least three years in law school and hours every month reading case law and dealing with issues relating to personal injuries and car wrecks. Every year they are required to attend mandatory Continuing Legal Education seminars that provide tips and current law on a variety of topics, including personal injury cases. These all work together to give them a tremendous advantage over the lay person when trying to settle a car wreck case short of trial.

 The real question, and the one that should interest you, isn’t how much you know but whether or not you will be able to do just as good a job as an attorney on your case when you finish this book?

Again, probably not. However, what you may be able to achieve is to do almost as good a job and end up getting more money for yourself than you would have after you deduct what the attorney would charge you and, in addition, you may achieve this sooner and that alone has some inherent value. To most, 95 cents today is worth more than a dollar would be two years from now.

The Guerrilla Guide to Settling Your Car Wreck Case is a little different than most of the other Guerrilla Guides. We did this one after looking at several of the other books on the market alleging to cover this topic and we realized that they were page after page of either nonsense or stuff that just didn’t matter. Why do you need a chapter devoted to whether you should hire a lawyer when, if you bought this book, you have already decided you don’t? Why do you need written exercises to do and why waste money on extra pages in a book for you to complete these written exercises when no one does them anyway?

You can buy the Guerrilla Guides to the law at RebellionBooks.com,  Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.