The round is the deadline. Everything compounds toward it.
Venture-backed companies live on a financing arc, and so does their legal work, whether or not anyone is managing it.
Formation
Founder stock, vesting, the 83(b), assignments. About an hour each done now, and weeks each reconstructed later.
Seed
SAFEs and notes, tracked in one ledger alongside their side letters. Post-money SAFEs stack up quietly, so model the conversion before you sign the next one.
First enterprise contract
The packet arrives with an MSA, a DPA, and a questionnaire, and whatever terms you accept become the precedent for every deal after it.
First key hires
Offers, equity, and assignments, now across state lines.
Series A diligence
Someone else's counsel opens the cap table, then the charter, then the IP chain. They look in that order, and that's where undiscovered problems surface, usually once someone starts reading line by line and not before.
After the A
A board that convenes, consents that carry weight, and governance the next round will diligence.
Training-data provenance. A model-license inventory. The AI terms sitting in your customer contracts. These are standard diligence questions now, and you either assemble the answers in advance or excavate them under a deadline.
Independence, in writing
We represent the company, not the fund and not any single founder. Deal counsel runs your financing, and we're the ones reading it from the company's side of the table. If those interests diverge, we say so out loud instead of letting it sit.
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."