Post Category → Austin

How Startups Burn Money on Lawyers

TL;DR Nutshell: There’s a lot of bad advice floating around startup ecosystems about how lawyers work, and how founders should go about minimizing their legal burn. Much of that advice, which is given without ever actually consulting lawyers, ends up costing founders more in legal fees in the long run.  Below are some thoughts (from someone who actually knows how startup law works) on how to not burn money on legal, while also not blowing up your company.

First off, let’s go ahead and get this out of the way: I am a startup lawyer.  Some would claim that this discredits me in writing about startup legal fees, because clearly I’m just going to write whatever maximizes my compensation. Right? Never mind that I spend 90% of my time on SHL writing about how startups can or should, for example:

If your attitude is that all lawyers are money-grubbers with no ethics beyond maximizing legal bills, then (i) this blog is not for you and please don’t ever e-mail me, (ii) I’m 99.9% confident that you’ve never actually built anything successful in business, and are not likely to, which is why you’ve never known good lawyers, so again please (iii) never contact me.

Now that we have that out of the way, here is a starting fundamental principle: when you put aside the issue of institutional overhead (which is a massive issue), the economics of lawyers closely aligns with the economics of developers: great developers, and great lawyers, expect great pay. If you’ve come to accept the reality that building a company on quality, scalable, durable software code requires paying the money to bring in great developers, it should not stretch your imagination to grasp why building a company on quality, scalable, durable contract drafting (which, when you think about it, is a lot like software code) requires paying the money to bring in great lawyers. And lest you forget, it does not cost $250,000 in education to become a software developer, but sadly (very, very, deeply sadly) that’s the going rate of top-tier law schools. :: deep sigh ::

Software code may determine whether your company ever makes money, but legal code determines whether you ever make money. That’s why founders who actually know what they’re doing hire great developers and great lawyers. 

With all of that in mind, the startups who burn money on lawyers fail to follow these basic rules:

1. Hire an actual Startup Lawyer, early.

Not an M&A lawyer. Not an oil & gas corporate lawyer. Not an IP lawyer. And certainly not the schmuck hanging around your coworking space or incubator who, because he’s friends with someone, decided to re-brand himself as startup lawyer without ever having seen a real VC deal. If you have a heart issue, you call a cardiologist. If you’re building a startup that will raise venture capital, you hire a lawyer who specializes in (guess what?) startups and venture capital.

There is a very simple test for determining whether the lawyer you’re talking to is actually a startup lawyer, notwithstanding what his LinkedIn profile says:

  • A. What were the last 3-5 Series A deals you closed, as the lead lawyer?

If the lawyer doesn’t pass the above test, you will never forgive yourself after going through the world of pain he will bring to your company.

And separately, cleaning up the mess of a bad lawyer ALWAYS costs 10x what it would’ve cost to have it done correctly on Day 1. You are not being capital efficient by letting your “lawyer friend” handle your formation, with plans to get a real lawyer when you’ve raised a little seed funding. You’re just accepting a smaller legal bill early on for a much much larger one a bit later.

2. Hire a law firm (not a solo lawyer), but not one too big (unless you plan to be a unicorn).

Now I’m ruffling some feathers, but SHL is not about making friends. Background reading:

Hire a solo lawyer, and you will (i) end up paying for a massive amount of inefficiency that an intelligently structured law firm would’ve avoided by adopting the appropriate technology, processes, and staffing, and (ii) max them out quickly. A $200/hr rate is not efficient if it’s multiplied by 3x the number of hours. If you are building a small company for which maybe a 6 or 7-figure exit is the end-game, a solo lawyer can be a great, even optimal fit. But companies going after big exits outgrow solo lawyers very quickly, and switching lawyers is very expensive.

Hire a very large firm, however, and you will pay for an enormous amount of bureaucracy and overhead that will not add a single bit of value to your company.  You’ll pay $600/hr, and $150 will make it to the lawyer, if she’s lucky. The fundamental principle requires paying for lawyers, not a bunch of unnecessary fluff. Modern software/SaaS has rendered the institutional structure of large firms completely unnecessary.

And be careful with referrals w/o your own verification. Out of hundreds of people I interact with, there are only a handful whose opinions on referrals for various services I actually trust as objective and based on merit. There are so many side-deals, “I scratch your back, you scratch mine” arrangements, and general cronyism in startup ecosystems that should lead you to be skeptical of any particular person’s lawyer recommendations. See also: Why Founders Don’t Trust Startup Lawyers. 

Sidenote: there is an exception here for companies truly on a billion-dollar track. BigLaw, with its extremely high rates, is designed for massive scale. If you legitimately see yourself as the next unicorn, then perhaps BigLaw really does make sense.

3. Use Specialists.

Background reading:  Startups Need Specialist Lawyers, But Not “Big Firm” Lock In

If a single lawyer says he can form your startup, close your seed financing, draft your real estate lease, draft your provisional patent, and apply for your trademark, run like the wind. This should be self-explanatory.

4. Do your homework, but don’t pretend that you can DIY.

If your startup law firm offers some very early work (like a formation) on a fixed fee (and they should), they are not doing it out of the kindness of their charitable heart. They are doing it because it (hopefully) makes economic sense for both sides. If you expect your lawyers to spend hours explaining to you the ins-and-outs of vesting schedules, IP, how convertible notes work, etc. etc., and yet somehow magically fit it all into an affordable fixed fee, you’re only going to select for crappy lawyers who have no choice but to accept such an unprofitable arrangement. Remember the fundamental principle.

The best founders I work with do their homework, and when they come to me with a request, they have already developed a working grasp of 75% of the concepts. Reading startup/vc law blogs, books, articles, etc. is to building a startup what reading WebMD is to being a medical patient. You will save money, make fewer mistakes, and get an overall much better end-result.

But the flip side of this is – accept that, no matter how much startup law might seem totally simple, even easily automatable, this is some complicated sh**. Very very smart people hire smart lawyers because they are smart enough to know what they don’t know.

You may think “I just want to issue some stock. That’s simple, right?” without having any clue as to all the steps that need to be taken, questions that need to be answered, and processes that need to be followed to actually accomplish that goal in a way that doesn’t create huge regulatory or contractual problems.  If you’ve hired the right lawyer(s), trust them to do their job. You will mess it up. 

5. Be Organized, and Make Clear Requests.

Related to “do your homework,” go to your lawyer(s) w/ clear action items or, at a minimum, clear questions that will help you arrive at clear action items.  You will burn a lot of legal funds asking your lawyer for one thing on Monday, changing the request on Wednesday, and then asking for tweaks on Thursday, than if you’d just waited until you knew exactly what needed to get done before making the request.

6. Be Realistic.

Good developers try everything they possibly can to avoid clients/CEOs whose views on how much time it actually takes to accomplish a task are totally detached from reality.  Good lawyers do the exact same thing with clients.  If (i) you have vetted your lawyer(s) and determined that they are trustworthy, efficient, and highly knowledgeable, then (ii) you should not be badgering them every month about why the bill is higher than you wanted it to be. It could backfire.  It would be ridiculous for me to walk into a company and tell the CEO how to run it, with zero domain expertise. Don’t be just as ridiculous with your lawyers and their practice.

Newsflash: you will ALWAYS pay more for lawyers than you want to pay. Remember the fundamental principle.

Hire an actual startup lawyer, at a firm that isn’t too big. Use specialists. Do your research, but trust your lawyers. Stay organized, and stay realistic.  Follow these principles and you will not get that Series A financing for $5,000 like you always wanted, but you will easily save 6-7 figures in legal fees over the life of your startup, and have a much healthier relationship with some of your closest advisors.

Should Non-SV Founders Use SAFEs in Seed Rounds?

Nutshell: Because of the golden rule (whoever has the gold…), probably not – at least not for now.

Background Reading:

For some time now, there have been people in the general startup ecosystem who have dreamt that, some day, investment (or at least early-stage investment) in startups will become so standardized and high velocity that there will be no negotiation on anything but the core economic terms. Fill in a few numbers, click a few buttons, and boom – you’ve closed the round.  No questions about the rest of the language in the document. For the .1% of startups with so much pull that they really can dictate terms to investors (YC startups included), this is in fact the case.  But then there’s the other 99.9%, much of which lies outside of Silicon Valley.

Much has been written about how SAFEs were an ‘upgrade’ on the convertible note structure, and in many ways they are.  But anyone who works in technology knows that there’s a lot more to achieving mass adoption than being technically superior, including the “stickiness” of the current market leader (switching costs) and whether the marginal improvements on features make those costs a non-issue. And any good lawyer knows that when a client asks you whether she should use X or Y, she’s not paying you for theory. You dropped that sh** on your way out of law school.

This isn’t California

From the perspective of founders and startups outside of California, which are the focus of SHL, the reality is that going with a SAFE investment structure is very rarely worth the cost of educating/convincing Texas angel investors on why they shouldn’t worry and just sign the dotted line. The entire point of the convertible note structure, which by far dominates Texas seed rounds, is to keep friction/negotiation to a minimum.  Yes, there are many reasons why equity is technically superior, but that’s not the point.  You agree on the core terms (preferably via a term sheet), draft a note, they quickly review it to make sure it looks kosher, and you close.  You worry about the rest later, when you’ve built more momentum.  Professional angels know what convertible notes are, and how they should look. They also know how to tweak them.  In Texas, many of them still do not know what a SAFE is. 

And, in truth, many Texas angels and seed VCs who do in fact know what a SAFE is simply aren’t willing to sign one. The core benefit of SAFEs to startups is that they don’t mature, and hence founders without cash can’t be forced to pay them back or liquidate.  To many California investors, this isn’t a big deal, because they’ve always viewed maturity as a gun with no bullets.  But Texas investors don’t see it that way.  Many find comfort in knowing that, before their equity position is solidified, they have a sharp object to point at founders in case things go haywire. I’ve seen a few founders who rounded up one or two seasoned angels willing to sign SAFEs, only to have to re-do their seed docs when #3 or #4 showed up and required a convertible note to close. It’s not worth the hassle, unless you have your entire seed round fully subscribed and OK with SAFEs

Just Tweak Your Notes

The smarter route to dealing with the TX/CO/GA and similar market funding environment is to simply build mechanics into your notes that give a lot of the same benefits as SAFEs. A summary:

  • Use a very low interest rate, like 1-2%. – Many local angels tend to favor higher interest rates (seeing 4-8%) than west and east coast seed investors. But if you can get a very low rate, it’s more like a SAFE.
  • Use a very long maturity period, like 36 months. – 18-24 months seems to have become more acceptable in TX, which is usually more than enough time to close an equity round, or at least get enough traction that your debt-holders will keep the weapons in their pockets.  But if you can get 36 months, go for it.
  • Have the Notes automatically convert at maturity –  This gets you as close to a SAFE as possible, and we’ve seen many angels accept it. If you run out of time and hit maturity, either the angels extend, or the Notes convert, often into common stock at either a pre-determined valuation (like the valuation cap, or a discount on the cap), or at a valuation determined at the conversion time.

How successful you’ll be at getting the above is just a matter of bargaining power and the composition of your investor base. Austin investors, who think more (but not completely) like California investors, tend to be more OK with these kinds of terms.  In Houston, Dallas, or San Antonio, you’ll likely get a bit more pushback.  But that pushback will almost certainly be less than what you’d get from handing someone a SAFE.

Closing Summary: There isn’t, and likely will never be, a national standard for seed investment documentation.  Every ecosystem has its nuances, and working with people who know those nuances will save you a lot of headaches. In Texas, the convertible note, however suboptimal, reigns supreme. Respect that reality, and work within it to get what you want.

The Tech Law Ecosystem vs. BigLaw; Except in Silicon Valley

Question: Why is it that, despite being the epicenter of championing innovative business models, dynamic markets, and the disruption of bloated institutions, Silicon Valley remains dominated by a handful of very large, expensive law firms built on century-old delivery models?

The Blunt Answer: Those large firms have dedicated biz dev people whose job is to write checks/cut deals with market players for referrals, and establish referral circles with investors who have heavy influence on the “pipeline.”  Referral pipelines rife with conflicts of interest have enabled BigLaw to entrench itself.

The entrenched firms deliberately seek out VCs (not just companies) as clients, who tacitly understand that, in exchange for the firms’ not pushing too hard on VC deals (when they represent companies), the VCs are supposed to act deeply concerned when they don’t see one of the good ol’ firms at the table; even if the lawyer they’re poo-pooing has impeccable credentials, experience, and even just left one of the very same firms on their ‘preferred list.’ Sound incestuous? It is. See Don’t Use Your Lead Investor’s Lawyers and Why Founders Don’t Trust Startup Lawyers.

It’s well known among the tech law community that no tech ecosystem –not Austin, Seattle, Boston, NYC, etc. – takes law firm “brand obsession” to levels anywhere near those of Silicon Valley, in large part for the above reasons.

History

The full answer is of course a bit more complicated. See: When the A-Lawyers Break Free: BigLaw 2.0.  Before the Cloud and SaaS, big firms truly were necessary to deliver the tier of legal counsel that top tech companies needed, and Silicon Valley’s early growth period occurred largely in that era.  But at some point technology changes things, and the rules of the game shift.  I’ve staked my career on the view that this shift has occurred, and is accelerating.  I left a large, full service firm designed around the traditional “one stop law shop” model for a smaller firm that leverages technology and an ecosystem of top solo lawyers, boutique firms, and other services to replicate “full service” in a much more efficient and flexible way.

A Summary of Why The Ecosystem is Emerging (Outside of Silicon Valley)

  • There have always been second and third tier small firms that (i) picked up clients top firms were not interested in, and (ii) employed lawyers who either never met the criteria of top firms, or dropped out of those firms because they were fine accepting less interesting work and lower compensation for a more easy-going life.  An alternative to going in-house, these lawyers call themselves “outsourced general counsel.”
  • Top, well-funded clients that reached scale (the kind that seek out and are willing to pay for top lawyers) inevitably required a large set of legal specialties: tax, executive comp, IP, tech transactions, trademarks, etc. to handle all of their legal needs.
  • Lacking an affordable, third-party collaboration infrastructure (like today’s Cloud/SaaS tools) to coordinate all of these different lawyers, keeping everyone (dozens of different specialties) under the same roof to share the high fixed overhead costs was historically essential to getting large deals done smoothly and as efficiently (for the time) as possible.
  • Hence, top paying clients gravitated to large firms that could serve them, and as long as those large firms paid the most, top lawyers (in all specialties) were willing to accept the astronomical overhead, convoluted structure, and inefficiency of their large employers.
  • But now, virtually every proprietary resource that large firms once had exclusivity on is available as a SaaS tool or outsourced service, along with very affordable and extremely effective collaboration tools.
  • Therefore, those top lawyers, once locked into large firms, are realizing that as long as they can wrestle away top clients from BigLaw, they no longer have to put up with taking home only a small percentage of their billings.  They can drop their rates significantly, take advantage of their small footprint to optimize for their practice area, and take home at least as much, and often much more, as they did in large firms.  A win-win for lawyer and client – but a loss for “The Beast.”
  • End-Result: A growing ecosystem of significantly smaller, more flexible law firms and solo lawyers that (i) are at the top of their field, well compensated, and have much better quality of life, and (ii) by collaborating with one another, replicate BigLaw’s “full service,” without its soul-sucking bureaucracy.

Austin’s “Cut the BS” Culture: The Ecosystem Grows

In my opinion and based on observations from interacting with players in various ecosystems, Austin’s legal market is at the forefront of this emerging lawyer ecosystem.  Here the quality of attorneys outside of BigLaw – multi-specialty small firms, single-specialty boutiques, and even solos  – is extremely high and increasing, because the client base here isn’t anywhere near as brand-obsessed as in Silicon Valley.  We still have our own cronyism, but our strong “be authentic” cultural bent helps keep it in check.

At E/N, we connect clients on a regular basis with experienced, top-tier corporate, tax, trademark, litigation, executive comp., patent, etc. attorneys outside of BigLaw, all with better credentials than the lawyers BigLaw throws to startups, and at rates often below inexperienced junior lawyers at large firms.  And, as far as I know, none of us took a pay-cut in leaving BigLaw.  I am fully convinced that this ecosystem will continue to gain traction, and we have every intention of pushing that traction outside of the Texas market, including connecting with firms in other markets doing the same.

How BigLaw Will Respond

Of course BigLaw is responding, but it’s important to keep in mind that “BigLaw” is a set of many different players, each with their own perspectives on the old model.  The big winners of the traditional law firm model were (i) the many layers of in-house administration and management needed to coordinate dozens of specialties and hundreds of different kinds of lawyers, and (ii) the power rain-makers sitting atop the pyramid extracting a significant amount of billings from lawyers doing the work, including all the specialists. These constituencies will absolutely do everything they can to protect the old model.

The main marketing message that will emerge from these groups will be one of “integration.”  They will argue that keeping everyone under a single structure provides benefits that make up for the overhead and inertia. In other words, they’ll try to portray themselves as the “Apple” of law.  Expensive and huge, but “worth it.” I love my iPhone 6.

Without getting stuck on this topic because this post is long enough, anyone who thinks about it will be skeptical of an analogy between software-hardware integration and the ‘integration’ of lawyers in dozens of different specialties, especially as technology continues to erode the friction in cross-firm collaboration.  A better analogy would be something like the Mayo Clinic, but of course that would mean that BigLaw must accept that only the absolutely most complex transactions (think billion-dollar, multi-national mergers) truly require its “integration” – and The Ecosystem would be more than happy to unburden BigLaw (which would then not be nearly so big) of the other 99.9% of the market.

While management and top rain-makers will work to protect The Beast, the rest of the BigLaw pyramid will, over time, come to realize that The Ecosystem is more of a liberator than a competitive threat.  Finally, a way to practice your specialty much more effectively, do interesting work, get paid well for your talent, and not have the significant majority sucked up to pay for “stuff” that doesn’t enhance your work.  Much like how technology has created an explosion of interesting, well-paying work outside of large organizations in many “knowledge worker” industries, The Ecosystem is simply an extension of that process to law.

A Message to BigLawyers

Ask yourself: if you’re billing $625/hr at a large firm and have developed strong relationships with clients, what will those clients say if you tell them you can do the exact same work for them, but charge $400/hr instead – the only real change being the signature block on your e-mails? Certainly The Beast, including the deal lawyer who ‘controls’ the relationship, will do everything it can to push the work to another $625/hr attorney in the firm. But what will the Client say?

Viewed this way, BigLaw today can be accurately described as a mechanism by which rain-makers who (lower-case c) “control” client relationships force the “labor” lawyers to stay in one large firm, accepting only a small percentage of the value they produce in exchange for “deal flow.” And by having the talent pool controlled in this way, clients who need top lawyers have to pay the higher rates to feed The Beast and the rainmakers.  The Ecosystem, and the fact that no one really controls clients (who won’t be forced to pay $625/hr when they can find the same lawyer for $400), throws a wrench in this structure.

A Message to Lawyers Building The Ecosystem

  • Collaborate;
  • Optimize;
  • Don’t fall back on generalism, but resist artisanal lawyering;
  • And absolutely do not underestimate ever the importance of branding and marketing.

Start talking to each other and sharing work.  Being solo has many inefficiencies, and for many specialties the “optimal” structure will likely be more focused firms that effectively leverage their institutional knowledge with targeted, efficient tools and processes.

Take advantage of your small footprint to experiment and iterate on process, technology, pricing, etc. that was never possible under a large firm – you are a startup.  Resist the urge to price yourself as a generalist who does boring, cheap work, but also don’t design your firm in a way that is so “high-touch, high-end” that it can’t scale.  If you’ve hit on something that works, scale it and liberate more BigLawyers.

And absolutely never, ever pretend that all it takes to succeed is to simply “be a good lawyer.”  Clients care about brand and prestige, including the deal lawyers who connect you to clients. No one can find you if you don’t know the slightest thing about marketing yourself. Serious companies won’t want to hire you if your website looks like it was built overnight by a middle schooler. Learn.

The Ecosystem will be built by the most entrepreneurial of BigLaw, including those who are confident enough in their personal brand to break free from The Beast. Once a path has been laid, the more timid will follow.

And a Message to the Gatekeepers

So you say that you’re all about disruption and transparent markets, yet you continue to hand out referrals to firms that write you checks and send attractive blondes offering steak dinners.  I’m not mad at you.  I know how the game works.  Upstanding doctors fall prey all the time to Big Pharma’s biz dev tactics, so I totally understand your inability to resist being a hypocritical little sh**.

Thankfully, every ecosystem (Austin included) has enough gatekeepers who believe in true meritocracy.  The Ecosystem is growing and will continue to grow. Companies will find a much more vibrant, dynamic legal market.  Top lawyers will find interesting, well-paying work in non-soul-sucking settings, and the most innovative will be rewarded with scale.  I’m not pretending to be Mother Theresa and absolutely have an economic dog in this fight.  But knowing all the benefits that accrue both to startups and to lawyers (my people) from it, supporting The Ecosystem is absolutely part of my mission.