The founder is the legal function. That was fine until this quarter.
Two to fifteen people, and every redline still lands on the same desk, which is yours.
Every hour you spend parsing an indemnity clause is an hour you didn't spend on product, on sales, or asleep. There will be mistakes too, but the mistakes aren't the real cost of being your own counsel. The real cost is the week you keep losing, and it compounds.
People, papered
Offer letters, invention assignments, and contractor lines drawn correctly the first time. That includes everyone who wrote code before there was a company to assign it to.
The first enterprise customer
They will send a questionnaire, a DPA, and an MSA written to favor them. Prepared in advance, that packet takes a week. Met for the first time on the call, it takes a month, and that month runs on their timeline with their leverage.
Equity kept current
Promises about equity tend to live in email at exactly this stage. Recorded now, they're bookkeeping. Reconstructed during a round, they become negotiations you're having from behind.
Customer redlines turned around on a committed timeline. The hiring packet stood up and kept current. The equity ledger kept true. And one thing you never thought to ask about, flagged before it mattered. All for a predictable engagement you agree to up front, with the full model on the pricing page.
Two things founders tell us they wish they'd done sooner
Signed assignments from every early contributor, because that gap surfaces at diligence and someone else is the one who finds it. And the 83(b), which has no later.
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."