TL;DR: Small business law is nowhere near the same thing as Startup Law. Many of the expensive legal errors that we see founders make often result from not understanding their distinction.

Background reading:

• Checklist for choosing a startup lawyer
• Startups need specialist lawyers
• How fake startup lawyers hurt founders

As I’ve written many times before, what separates startup lawyers from the vast majority of other kinds of services that an early-stage founder will need to engage is the extremely high cost, and in some cases permanence, of errors. Making a mistake in coding, accounting, or other areas is often a matter of issuing a version update, changing a report, or perhaps paying a small fee. Making a mistake in a contract (which can’t be unilaterally fixed), or taking a misstep that exposes you to legal liability, can create irreversible exposure that in some cases blows up companies, or in others proves 10x-20x+ more expensive than simply having done it properly the first time.

This is why smart entrepreneurs building serious companies take far more seriously what lawyers they engage – their background, credentials, experience, network and reputation – than they do for other professionals.

One way to avoid huge costs in engaging lawyers is to understand what distinguishes startup lawyers from other lawyers, and to really understand the difference between a small business and a startup; because it’s “small business lawyers” whom I usually encounter making the most egregious mistakes that harm startup founders.

A “startup lawyer” is a corporate/securities lawyer with a heavy specialization in early-stage companies. I have seen litigators, real estate lawyers, patent lawyers, etc. who for some reason represent themselves also as “startup lawyers,” and any founder who understands how legal services work should be completely terrified of using them. See: How fake startup lawyers hurt founders.

A “startup” is a business that, while starting out small, expects to (i) grow much more quickly relative to a typical new business, (ii) expects to have more cross-jurisdictional legal issues (less local) either via hiring across state/country lines or customer relationships across state/country lines, (iii) usually intends to use equity in some manner for recruiting purposes, instead of keeping it closely held by 1-2 founders/partners, and (iv) often, but not always, expects some form of capital injection from angel or seed investors in the near future.

Contrast a “startup,” with a small business, like a coffee shop, or a boutique clothing store. In the small business case, early customers and employees/contractors are expected to be geographically contained, it would be highly unusual to use equity ownership for recruiting purposes, and beyond money from a partner or two, it would be very unusual to raise outside capital for years until the business has proven successful and an expansion plan has been put in place.

Startups, as defined above, hit far more complex corporate, securities, tax, financial, intellectual property, labor/employment, etc. legal issues far more quickly than small businesses, and that is why startup lawyers and small business lawyers are very different people, with very different credentials. If you contrast a highly regarded startup lawyer with a small business lawyer, you’ll find the former will almost invariably have graduated from much higher ranked schools, trained at much larger firms early on in their career, and generally be connected and have access to specialists in a much wider variety of legal fields; because startup law is way more complicated, and prone to expensive errors, than small business law.

And this is why so many of the expensive errors we encounter when startups arrive at our doorstep come from founders engaging small business lawyers lacking the background and resources to properly do the work; on top of services like LegalZoom and Rocket Lawyer, which are not structured for startups.

A small business and a startup are not the same thing; not even close. From a legal perspective, they are totally different worlds. In fact, I rarely/ever encounter specialized startup lawyers who even represent themselves as small business lawyers; but I too often see the reverse, where small business lawyers will throw in “startup law” on their website to see if they can train on a founder’s dime.

Do your diligence, or you’ll regret it.