As a lawyer, I try above all to work with clients in flexible ways. Every lawyer should do this and many do. A client should never feel that coming to a lawyer

As a lawyer, I try above all to work with clients in flexible ways. Every lawyer should do this and many do. A client should never feel that coming to a lawyer is something at all costs to be avoided unless and until he is prepared to pay in blood. Now this is a thoughtful piece and I am not saying that this is the tenor of the argument. But all or nothing is not the way to approach your company formation legal issues. First, as early on as possible, you should meet with a good lawyer in the startup field to get a strategic perspective on the legal issues. What are the legal goals you need to accomplish? How do you best go about them? What are the likely costs of different ways of going about the process? Is there a fixed-fee package that make sense for your goals? This type of initial meeting might be introductory and general (and free) or might get into all the specifics of your case (in which it would likely cost you something, but not much). If you are a sole founder, do the quickie incorporation and be done with it, as soon as possible. In that situation, it is not an issue of "doing it right" because you can pretty much stumble along blind and still get it basically right for the simple legal issues involved. If you are part of a founding team, and need to impose vesting on founder stock, file 83(b) elections, capture IP via assignment agreements, set up equity incentives for key people, etc., then do not wait to shop this around to knowledgeable law firms. If what you hear is rigid and expensive, then perhaps you should wait but doing so carries its own risks. I think what you will find, though, is that you can get a knowledgeable lawyer to do this sort of more sophisticated package on reasonable terms, sometimes as low as $2K or $3K for legal fees if the founding team is reasonably sophisticated and does not need a lot of hand-holding. If you shop it around and don't get the right quotes, then you can make a conscious decision to say, "I know I might need this but I will take the risks and wait in order to stretch my dollars." If you have gotten a strategic perspective from an initial meeting, and done the shopping, then you will make such a decision based on a careful analysis of the issues involved, giving each of the trade-offs their due weight. Perhaps this is all another way of saying just what the author does ("hold off until you have the cash to spare") but perhaps you really do have the cash earlier rather than later if, by following these simple steps, you discover it really is not such an expensive process to "do it right" for your circumstances right up front.