My spouse is in-house counsel (lawyer) for a software company. Her objective, and the reason she's on staff, is to get stuff done efficiently and cost-effectiv

My spouse is in-house counsel (lawyer) for a software company. Her objective, and the reason she's on staff, is to get stuff done efficiently and cost-effectively. When she writes a sales contract she tries to write it so everybody can say, "that's fair" and sign it, rather than send it off to some slow and expensive review. Sales people love that. Same for smaller stuff like NDAs. She did that stuff for some of my entrepreneurial ventures. Big win. Litigation: she looks beyond the white-shoe gold-tie-clip downtown firms to handle that kind of stuff. Escrow for code: If some source code needs to be held in escrow, she says, "look, I'm an officer of the court, answerable to more than just my boss. Suppose you put the thumb drive or DVD-R in an sealed envelope. I'll put it in another sealed envelope and hold it in my locked file cabinet." Many parties say "good idea!" because escrow services aren't cheap. She has a rubber stamp that says, in some kind of legalese, "We don't pay unitemized bills. Please provide more detail and send this bill again." That can save a bundle of money. The concealed "bonuses" for partners sometimes evaporate from the bills. The "stamp" works well; the billing firm has no idea whether it's legal or A/P refusing the bill, so they just provide more detail. Financings: not much leverage there. They still have to hire outside counsel with expensive lawyers and paralegals who can bench-press massive tomes of dense legalese. I suspect a software service that inspected and tracked legal bills payable by tech companies might pay for itself pretty quickly. (Ingest pdfs? Look for keywords and numbers?)