Nathan Cross

Nathan Cross started the Plain English Legal & Financial Library on a simple observation: the gap between what a lawyer or a CPA charges to explain something and what a person actually needs to understand to make a good decision is enormous — and almost nobody was writing to close it.

Most legal and financial guidance sits at one of two extremes. Either it's a blog post that oversimplifies to the point of being useless, or it's written for other professionals and assumes knowledge most readers don't have. Cross's books are built for the space in between: thorough enough to actually prepare someone to form an LLC, fund a trust, or negotiate a divorce settlement, but written in sentences a reader can act on without a law degree.

Every title in the library follows the same method — start from the actual governing documents (state statutes, IRS guidance, standard-form contracts), identify where people consistently get it wrong or get taken advantage of, and build the book around preventing exactly that. The appendix forms in each guide aren't generic templates pulled from a legal forms website; they're built to match the chapter that precedes them.

Cross is not a law firm and these books are not legal advice — they're what he believes a reader should know before they walk into a lawyer's office, so that conversation is shorter, cheaper, and better informed.