Legal Forms for Starting & Running a Small Business: 65 Essential Agreements, Contracts, Leases & Letters

Create solid contracts for your business

As a small business owner, you can’t afford to farm paperwork and contracts out to a lawyer—you have to deal with them yourself. With Legal Forms for Starting & Running a Small Business, you can act with confidence.

Here you’ll find the forms you need to start and grow your business. Each document comes with thorough, plain-English, line-by-line instructions to help you:

• write contracts
• prepare corporate bylaws
• prepare an LLC operating agreement
• hire employees and consultants
• create noncompete agreements
• protect your trade secrets
• record minutes of meetings
• lease commercial space
• buy real estate
• borrow or lend money

The 12th edition has been thoroughly reviewed and updated by Nolo’s experts and provides the most up-to-date legal information for small businesses.

With Downloadable Forms Download and customize more than 65 forms to help you start and run your small business (details inside).

Attorney Fred Steingold practiced law for over 40 years in Ann Arbor Michigan, where he was well known and highly regarded by the local legal community. Fred wrote and updated several best-selling titles for Nolo, including Legal Guide for Starting & Running a Small Business, Nolo's Guide to Single-Member LLCs, and The Employer's Legal Handbook.  

Editors of Nolo Nolo’s editorial department includes more than a dozen legal editors and a full-time legal researcher, who collectively have more than 100 years’ experience turning legal jargon into plain English. Most of our editors gave up careers as practicing lawyers in favor of furthering Nolo’s mission: Getting legal information into the hands of the people who really need it. All Nolo legal editors specialize in certain areas of the law, and many are recognized as national experts in their field. They write books, edit books by outside authors, and in their spare time write online articles and blogs, develop legal forms, and create the legal content of Nolo software.