Ask HN: Incorporating a business and initial legal work: go solo or use a lawyer?

Re:Ask HN: Incorporating a business and initial legal work: ... by patio11 on Monday June 09, 2014 @03:48PM (#7870106)

LegalZoom is perfectly adequate for incorporating, particularly if you're doing it solo and don't need to worry about e.g. equity or vesting between multiple partners.

With regards to getting an MSA drafted: many consultants just use one from NoLo or similar. Your larger clients who most care about the details will simply refuse to use yours and counterpropose using their standard paper. You will say that you'll accept their standard paper pending legal review and pay a lawyer a few hundred bucks per incident. Your lawyer will, ideally, prevent you from agreeing to any term that "gives away the store", like e.g. an IP assignment or non-compete which would prevent you from ever doing anything in a related field again.

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Re:Ask HN: Incorporating a business and initial legal work: ... by andale on Monday June 09, 2014 @03:55PM (#7870145)

Thanks for the input. FWIW, we are looking to form a multimember LLC. I've read over several operating agreements and we're both on the same page as far as that goes, not sure if that might alter your feedback.

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Re:Ask HN: Incorporating a business and initial legal work: ... by tptacek on Monday June 09, 2014 @04:17PM (#7870246)

Do talk to a lawyer before forming a multi-member LLC. If there's any chance that any subset of the members of that LLC will go on to develop something bigger, you need to work out vesting and control.

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Re:Ask HN: Incorporating a business and initial legal work: ... by andale on Monday June 09, 2014 @05:08PM (#7870512)

Many thanks for the input. Right now the only members of the LLC are my cofounder and myself. We intend to keep it that way (and dole out shares to investors and employees down the road). As for vesting, he and I are on identical schedules.

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