Category: Startup Lawyer (Choosing Counsel & Legal Ops)
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Working With a Startup Lawyer
Start here: If you want the broader overview, start with our Startup Legal Roadmap. Working with a startup lawyer means using legal support to help you make decisions earlier, document them correctly, and avoid expensive rework later. For most venture-backed or venture-aspiring companies, that starts with formation, founder papering, hiring, commercial contracts, and financing. From there, legal…
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Crosby.AI and the (Possible) Return of the Two-Entity Structured “Law Firm of the Future”
Legal tech writing loves a good demo: instant redlines, smarter clause suggestions, fewer 2 a.m. deal scrambles, cheaper lawyer fees. But “AI-native” legal service providers revive an older, nerdier question: corporate structure. When a company calls itself an AI-powered law firm, is it one entity, two entities, or something in between? And if the answer…
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AI Didn’t Kill Startup Lawyers. It Just Gave Everyone Better Tools.
“It’s always been difficult to make a good record. To be perfectly honest with you, it’s really about the person that’s pushing the buttons. No matter what type of equipment you have, you still have to have a certain talent to be able to make a good record. Everything that I used to do is…
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Acceleration Book Update – 1 Month
I wanted to share a brief update on the launch of my startup law book: Acceleration. The book launched on March 5, 2019 and the next day I left for a family vacation on the other side of the world, so I did not do much of a marketing push beyond a blog post and…
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Acceleration Startup Law Book Title and Cover Design
Thought I might take some time to explain the origin of the title and the book cover design for “Acceleration: What All Entrepreneurs Must Know About Startup Law“. The Title: Acceleration Quite often, a new client starts our first meeting with something like: “We messed up the legal at our last startup, so we want…
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So I wrote a Startup Law Book called “Acceleration”
If you follow this blog, then you probably know new posts have been harder to find than a four-leafed clover in the desert. But I had a good reason — I’ve spent the good portion of the last 3 years putting together a startup law book, when I wasn’t doing my venture lawyer day job…
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Introducing the Startup Law Glossary
In case you didn’t know, this blog includes a growing Startup Law Glossary —a plain‑English guide to terms and concepts that founders and startup teams run into from incorporation all the way through fundraising, growth, and ultimately an acquisition or IPO. You can find it at the top of each page by clicking “Glossary”, or…
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The $10,000 Sentence
You’re building a startup, and everything is scarce, especially capital. So when a legal issue pops up (like incorporation), it’s normal to do a cost-benefit analysis before hiring a startup lawyer. I understand the instinct to make sure you’re getting value for a small budget. I did the same thing when I hired a large…
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Stock for Fees
Recently I’ve written about potential conflicts of interest between you and your startup lawyer. Now for the main event: Stock for Fees. This situation arises when a startup company offers stock to a lawyer in exchange for legal services. I’ve derived the following 2 postulates to explain why startups and lawyers agree to this setup:…
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How I Launched My Startup (Law Firm) 2016 Update
I’m often contacted by lawyers for advice about going solo or how to start a law firm. In the legal world, going solo is the equivalent of quitting your day job and launching your startup full-time. So I’m dedicating this blog post to provide some background about how I launched my startup law firm. I…