Honestly, my point isn't about saving money (although that's a nice side benefit). My point is that there's not a single "good" lawyer out there who says, 1) I

Honestly, my point isn't about saving money (although that's a nice side benefit). My point is that there's not a single "good" lawyer out there who says, 1) I do this and 2) This is what it costs. I'm very much of the opinion that if a third year associate at Wilson, Orrick, or wherever put out a shingle and said "I'll do these forms for you and it'll cost $10K (I've been told that this group of docs runs ~$5K)" that they'd get away with it: make more and work less. Barring "good", I'd settle for competent - where my arbitrary line is just someone who has passed the bar. That's why I made that comment; you can get competent for 95% of cases off of these model documents. Lookit, Orrick puts out these docs, great. But Orrick's really dumb. One, they don't have a page that says cleanly and clearly "we do incorporation for new startups, and we can introduce you to angels and VCs" even though that's exactly what they do. They don't say "we have six partners who do incorporation work, one each in internet, hardware, enterprise software, biotech, cleantech, and services" even though they surely have multiples of each. Instead, we get this page: http://www.orrick.com/practices/corporate/emergingCompanies/lawyers.asp http://www.orrick.com/practices/corporate/emergingCompanies/... Let me spell it out: this list is completely useless to a budding startup founder. It doesn't tell me which person to call. This is why big law firms are dumb as rocks; just segment the list. And take off the Associates. Yes, I know the Associate will do the work. No, the Associate shouldn't be the senior point of contact for any startup. The Associate ain't the one sending an e-mail to Clavier. Did you know that even though I'm in Illinois, I could have hired a Valley law firm to do my incorporation work? I'm sure you did, but I didn't, and it's cost me an extra $50K in legal fees I wouldn't have had to pay if Yokum did my incorporation, where I would have had better advice and more complete set of documents from the get-go. That's where the opportunity is; undercutting the inability of the best law firms to cleanly and succinctly explain just what the hell it is they do.