The Ultimate Cheat Sheet for Your Startup Legal Needs
Make sure you never get ripped off by your attorney
If you’re launching a startup, every single dollar is so precious. It can make the difference of extending your runway, hiring an employee, spending more on marketing and the list goes on. LawTrades helps entrepreneurs get affordable legal help on demand from top notch attorneys throughout the country. After almost 15,000 price quotes, we’ve crunched the numbers to come up with an ultimate pricing list that entrepreneurs can use. These prices are from startup attorneys that have on average 5–7 years experience and that come from firms with 1–10 attorneys.
Use this list to make sure that you‘re not getting ripped off by your existing law firm. This post had to be made because too many startups are getting screwed by their law firms.
I categorized all the common services that you’re going to need at an early stage. All these prices are flat rate prices. You should always ask for a flat rate price no matter what. Hourly rates are for dinosaurs.
- Incorporating in Delaware: Most startups incorporate in Delaware because investors prefer it. To simply register your business in Delaware, you should never pay more then $300. This includes the filing fee. Registering the business is very straight forward because an attorney is simply filing out the forms for you on the DE state website.
- A post incorporation creates the infrastructure for the company. It creates the by laws, initial board consent, an IP assignment, stock agreements etc. The price for this truly depends on the amount of founders in the company. We’ve seen post incorporations go for as low as $600 and as high as $3000 when there are several co-founders involved.
Larger law firms are literally charging upwards of $6,000 to form a Delaware C-Corp. Unreal.
3. An employment agreement is straight forward. We’ve seen them formed in the range of $200- $500 on the higher end.
4. Terms of Service & Privacy Policy can vary based on the amount of data your collecting. A well drafted terms of service and privacy policy should run you $400-$1000. $1000 + for very sophisticated websites.
5. If you’re trademarking a name or logo, we’ve consistently seen applications filed for $550-$750 if it’s for 1 series and 1 class. This includes the government filing fee.
6. If you need a non disclosure agreement, you can find these all over the internet for completely free. If you need one for free tweet at me and I’ll send you one. If for some reason you wanted one custom made, it shouldn’t cost more then $200.
7. Sales agreement- $200–$700.
8. Hiring an independent contractor requires a very straight forward contract. You could get one as low as $150 and as high as $500.
These are all the bare bone documents that you’re going to need at an early stage startup. In my next post, I’ll include a price list for LLC’s, patents and different fundraising instruments.
If you found this post helpful, please recommend it and share it with a friend that’s launching a business. If you need help finding a flat rate price listed above, feel free to visit us at LawTrades or email me, aw@lawtrades.com.
