At the end of 2019, I just finished my own startup adventure. I was a founder, created some tech, sold it, raised money, had a board. Indeed, I had the full-on startup experience. I even made some money although there was no unicorn exit.
One of the things I realised is that there is still room for lawyers and law firms, but the model of delivering legal services is fundamentally broken. Cliff Hyra, my partner, felt the same way and we set out to create a firm that would be fundamentally different.
Perhaps the most important insight that I had from my startup days was that law firms are way too focused on themselves. They operate in a certain way, this has been “sort of” working for most firms and working really well for some others, so they just carry on.
We have taken a deep, hard, look, at what our clients want and need. One need that consistently came up was that almost all founders (bar a few that bootstrap) are obsessively dealing with fundraising. We also realised that law firms do not help with that at all. Even law firms that are dealing with the fundraising process and know a lot of investors do not help anyone raise any money.
The lack of money at early stages impacts the quality of legal advice and specifically the quality of IP that companies generate. Many companies postpone their IP expenditure until they get funding and at that point it may be too late.
So we created a startup program meant to address both of these issues.
Our startup program deals with both issues:
- Firstly, we really help with the funding process. We start with reviewing the pitch deck and we provide honest and actionable insights on how to improve it. This is not a hypothetical. We already had companies going through this process “informally” and raising tens of millions of dollars. Recently, we formalised the process. We then help, where and when we can, with introductions to investors we know. In some occasions, we open our own cheque book.
- The other side of our startup program is a huge reduction in our service fees for a year. We want companies to be able to afford the best legal services. By cutting our margins and supporting companies early, we hope they will go on to become clients for life.
Our startup program is open to early stage, deep-tech startups.
Further explanations on our startup program.
