Practice area
Contracts & employment matters
The agreements the business signs once it exists, and the terms on which it hires the first people who are not founders.
What this usually looks like
Somebody has sent you a contract. It runs nineteen pages, their counsel drafted it, and the deadline is Friday. Or you are about to make an offer to your first employee, using a template written for a different state and a different decade. Either way, the document will govern the relationship long after everyone has forgotten the conversation that produced it.
Most of this work is repetitive by design. The point of drafting a form once is that the next twenty uses of it are a decision about terms rather than a decision about language.
What is included
The work, itemized
- Master services and vendor agreementsThe terms you sign again and again, drafted once so the tenth signing takes an afternoon.
- Customer contracts and statements of workWhat gets delivered, by when, and what happens on the day that date moves.
- Offer letters and employment agreementsWritten for the state the person actually works in, not the state of the template.
- Contractor and consultant classificationThe distinction that costs nothing to get right and a great deal to get wrong.
- Confidentiality and invention assignmentWho owns what gets built, settled before anyone starts building it.
- Handbook and policy reviewThe policies that get quoted back to you later, read closely before they are needed.
Fit
Whether this is your problem yet
When you need this
You are signing something you did not draft, hiring someone who is not a founder, or reusing a template for the fifth time without knowing what is actually in it. Any of those is the point where one careful read costs less than the argument it prevents.
When you don't
The agreement is small, the counterparty is known, and the worst outcome is an amount you would not miss. Paying for review of a low-stakes document is a real cost against no matching benefit, and saying so out loud is part of the job.
Proof point
From the other side of the table
As COO and general counsel, I managed 350 employees and negotiated and monitored more than $100 million in third-party contracts, with counterparties that included Google, eBay Fulfillment, and Facebook. I signed those agreements knowing I would be the one living with them, not just drafting them and moving on.
Related
What usually comes next
Business formation & corporate maintenance
The paperwork that decides who owns what, who decides what, and what happens when one of you wants out.
Debt & equity financing
Notes, SAFEs, priced rounds and credit facilities, and the cap table that has to still reconcile after every one of them.
Employment matters, specifically
Hiring is where a business first discovers its paperwork is a system rather than a stack of documents. The offer letter points to a handbook, the handbook points to a policy, and the policy assumes a classification. Get the classification wrong and none of the rest holds up. This section exists because employment work has its own shape, distinct from the commercial agreements above it, and a template that treats the two as one problem tends to shortchange both.
Let's talk
Tell me what you're building
The first conversation is free and takes as long as it takes. If the answer is that you do not need any of this yet, that is the answer you will get.