Even as a business lawyer, I can heartily recommend self-help resources, of which Nolo is a good example. They use highly qualified lawyers as authors to distil

Even as a business lawyer, I can heartily recommend self-help resources, of which Nolo is a good example. They use highly qualified lawyers as authors to distill legal issues for use by lay people. During the fever pitch reached in the bubble era, I bumped into a situation where a startup had raised $7M from so-called "accredited investors" by advertising the opportunity on the web. Large numbers of the investments were in the $5K range from, e.g., a small town in Texas, and it is clear that the investors were merely clicking through a screen by which they confirmed they were "accredited" without really being so. By the way, the SEC does allow companies to use the web in certain restricted circumstances in connection with their offerings (the above case obviously did not comply with these restrictions) and, with the several thousand investors involved, stood a good chance of being characterized as an improper public offering of securities.