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Ask HN: What do startups pay business attorneys for emails?
I'm wondering what startup's experience has been with their business law and deal attorney charges specifically for emails, postal letters and/or faxes.
Do they charge for each and every email or only emails over a certain length? What are typical charges for these items?
- kayhi 12y agoMost charge by time not by the number or type of interaction
- larrys 12y agoI know they charge by time I was wondering what the typical charges are that are linked to emails. For example if you email a question to your attorney and he emails back a 1 paragraph or 1 sentence response does that show up in billing as "email re: clarification $75" etc.
- BorisMelnik 12y agoI had an attorney send a 6 sentence email to a stock photo company and he charged me $325 which included 1 additional correspondence of a similar length.
- tptacek 12y agoUsually, when you ask your lawyer to do something, you ask how many hours you're going to incur, unless you don't care.
- larrys 12y agoI got bogged down the other day with 29 somewhat long emails in one day back and forth for a negotiating project that I took on for a VC firm who I've dealt with before. Handholding and explaing to all parties on issues that weren't even related to the actual transaction in a sense. [1] Without that handholding the deal would fall through (just closed today after another 30 emails). That's in addition to whatever happened over the past 6 weeks. Plenty. Specifically the emails didn't relate to negotiating issues they related to things unrelated but needed to make sure the seller didn't back out. I don't quote on an hourly basis (I like to go on "value") but in this case I was curious whether I could build into my rate some way to protect myself by using something that is somewhat familiar to people using attorneys already. (Hence the request for feedback and basic framework...I know I always got billed for letters from attorneys in the past..) This is a side thing that I do essentially for fun however getting tied up in emails all day kind of kills the fun. [1] Example: How to use dig or nslookup to verify DNS records are setup properly. Then explaining that you don't need to query both primary and secondaries just one is fine. Sellers "tech guy" thought he had to verify 40 dns records on 4 different AWS servers and threw in the towel which literally almost killed the whole deal.