We know that for many of our clients, this is their first time engaging legal counsel. We also know that other clients may have had outside counsel in the past, but didn’t enjoy the experience and therefore just tried to avoid interacting with counsel as much as possible. The Venturous Counsel team is exclusively focused on startup representation and has decades of collective experience to draw on when it comes to getting the most out of your legal spend. Below are some tips and best practices that are bound to save you time, money, and stress—freeing you to focus on doing what you do best.
- Give us the full context. We’re always happy to limit the scope of our work when a client requests it, but we also can’t render competent advice (even on a narrowed topic) without knowing what all the moving pieces are (for example, the size or strategic importance of a proposed transaction). We know it takes some extra effort, but sharing that information upfront (and attaching any relevant documents or prior communications) can shave considerable time off of our review and eliminate our need to ping or dig for details on a piecemeal basis, saving you money and improving the quality of our work product.
- Loop us in as early as possible. Sometimes clients delay in letting us know about an upcoming project, financing, or transaction because they think it will reduce legal costs. But generally, the opposite happens. If we learn about a project late in the process, it increases the chances that there are issues or errors to clean up or missed opportunities to leverage our market knowledge, which can result in needless costs as well as substandard economics in a transaction. It also tends to result in avoidable ‘urgency’ (which always drives costs as ‘urgent’ matters are more often handled by more senior staff due to bandwidth/availability). Proactively giving us a heads up the instant something significant hits your radar is the fiscally savvy move.
- Keep us in the loop. Be sure to use our documents@venturouscounsel.com email address to send all executed documents (or, if you’re sharing Google documents with us, please use venturouscounsel@gmail.com) – this allows us to process documents efficiently with our admin team, flag any action items and organize documentation so that we will have access to be very responsive and it means we should sail smoothly through any diligence process, shaving a lot of time and cost off of the transaction.
- Limit ‘time sensitive’ requests to when it really matters. If you’ve ever worked with ‘Biglaw’ attorneys, you already know that we are much, much faster than they are—we turn most projects around in less than 48 hours (often same- or next-day). And when something truly urgent comes up, we will absolutely bump it to the top of our priority list and work (even into off hours and weekends if needed) to expedite a project. But again, urgency always drives cost. Lower cost billers (paralegals and more junior attorneys) may have limited bandwidth at the last minute (or if work needs to be done outside normal business hours), and there are always efficiency trade-offs when urgency is involved. Sometimes it’s unavoidable, and we’re there to support you in those times! But for everything else, trust that we’re on it, and we’ll get it to you shortly and in the most efficient matter.
- Clarify priorities. When it rains, sometimes it pours. If you send multiple projects our way, consider sending us a note letting us know what’s most important—we’ll always do our best to usher all projects along as quickly and efficiently as possible, but having a clear sense of what’s most important to you will help us organize our resources most efficiently and also avoid the need to start, stop, and restart projects (which also drives costs).
- Leverage the resources we recommend. Services like Clerky (for formations and equity issuances) and Carta (for cap table management) are able to handle a lot of work that used to be handled by attorneys—and that’s a great thing! Though there can be some upfront costs to using these services (and we still need to be involved), we know from experience how much they can save our clients, because they gradually reduce the extent to which clients need to rely on us for routine matters that are capable of being at least partially automated.
- Take our advice. We understand that trust has to be earned and that for new clients (especially ones who have had bad experiences with legal counsel in the past), it can take some time to get comfortable deferring to us, even on things that are squarely in our wheelhouse. Please understand that, more than any other counsel, our mission is aligned to support your success and we are always focused on optimizing the resources you devote to legal (we have plenty to keep us busy). If we recommend something that may involve more upfront expenditure, it’s because we know from our experience of dealing with hundreds of clients that it will save you considerably down the line. We will never recommend something that isn’t practical from a financial and strategic standpoint. We’ve got your back!