June 8, 2007

To Lawyer or Not to Lawyer?

There’s been quite a bit of discussion around Guy Kawasaki’s By The Numbers post where he detailed every cost behind launching Truemors. Much of the discussion focused around his nearly $5000 in legal fees, which by the way, is how much I have allotted for echonote’s entire budget.

I found this a bit unsettling since I have absolutely no legal budget. Well, that’s not entirely true since I did pay $299 to form a parent LLC for echonote and the other startups I plan on launching. Still, that’s peanuts compared to $5000. Not to mention that I’m not even sure if the cookie cutter LLC formed is actually protecting me. This is something I’ll have to live with at this point though as there is no way I can afford $500/hour lawyers for a web app that I am funding myself and has yet to launch.

Although I do worry a little about not having competent lawyers watching my back, I think it’s a little premature to be worrying about covering my ass to that extent. Hopefully I’m not way off base and don’t end up being ill prepared when an unexpected legal hiccup arrives.

I’m obviously quite interested myself if I run into any legal battles along the way and when/if I decide it’s time to hire on lawyers. I’ll definitely be writing more on this as I move forward.

For another take on appropriate legal fees for your startup, Particle Tree has a great post on how and why they decided on two separate legal paths.