The team is the company. Paper it that way.
Employment problems start as small informalities and compound quietly, and a few of them reach founders personally.
- 1
Your first five hires span three states and two countries. Your offer letter is from a template written for none of them.
- 2
An early contractor built half the product. Their agreement says nothing about IP, assuming you can still find their agreement.
- 3
The new applicant-tracking system scores candidates with AI. Nobody asked whether that's legal where you're hiring.
The first-hire packet, done right
Offer letters, invention assignments, confidentiality, at-will language that survives in the states you're actually hiring in, and equity documentation that matches what somebody promised out loud in the interview. Fixing one hire's paperwork today costs an hour. Finding it in diligence costs a great deal more, at the worst possible moment.
Classification by the test, not the label
Contractor or employee gets decided by a legal test that an agency or a plaintiff's lawyer applies years after the fact. The title on the agreement doesn't decide it. Misclassification reaches wages, taxes, and benefits, and in some states it reaches founders personally. We draw those lines while they're still cheap to draw.
Departures without debris
Terminations done properly, which means separation agreements, equity treatment, repurchase mechanics handled on the clock they actually run on, and the IP confirmation that keeps the code yours. The goal is a departure nobody is still talking about a year later.
The AI in your hiring stack
If AI screens resumes or scores interviews, notice and audit obligations may already apply to you. Illinois's law took effect January 2026, and New York City has required bias audits since 2023, with the enforcement posture sharpening. That makes buying an AI-enabled ATS a legal decision as much as a tooling one, and we'd rather be in the room before the contract gets signed. We keep the answer current as the map moves.
We're not an HR department and we don't replace one. If a dispute turns into litigation, we bring in employment litigators and manage them for you. The work here is the people-paper that keeps you out of a courtroom in the first place.
Fifteen minutes. No pitch.
You talk, we diagnose. You leave with the two or three exposures worth addressing first, along with a straight answer on whether you need counsel now, including "not yet."