The first round we raised, which was around $500k, we paid $65k in legal fees. Our lawyers spent 2 weeks in conference calls with the investors' lawyers, so we

The first round we raised, which was around $500k, we paid $65k in legal fees. Our lawyers spent 2 weeks in conference calls with the investors' lawyers, so we were getting billed anywhere from 4x to 6x their individual hourly rates (600-900/h for partners and 350-650/h for associates) for these conversations. Part of the problem stems from the lawyer mentality that they are meant to be going to war for you. Although everyone in our deal was completely amicable, they spent countless hours haggling over trivial points to "help" us while losing us far more money in their fees. What I would like from a dream startup lawyer would be: * Document templates for all common funding/employee/equity situations * Work done by single, highly qualified lawyer * An understanding of what actually matters to (and is best for) startups * The ability to short circuit conversations with the opposing lawyers * Lower costs by reducing irrelevant overhead (fancy offices, etc) I'm less fussed about 24h availability and don't care whether someone will cancel their dinner plans to work on my case, but I can certainly understand how the author of this article would be pleasantly surprised when he got those things as well. Someone could charge me twice what a normal partner was charging per hour, and I'd gladly pay it if they did the above, since they would be far more than twice as efficient.