Entrepreneurial Law Forum

[Alex-Trof]

I know few people who started their own businesses, and all of them hired attorneys to help them in the process. Anybody has any experience with this type of work? Can you ask for percentage of business rather than monetary payment in return for legal services? Is it difficult market to break into? Is there any specific path in school/career you need to take to be able to do something like that?

[AP-375]

I believe Duke has an LLM in entrepreneurial law, although I don't know what the value of that would be.
Venture capital law might be the most specific form of this, although I imagine it is difficult to break into the field enough to have that be your entire practice. There are some firms that specialize in this.
Aside from VC law, most general corporate departments will do work with basic corporate governance and structuring.
I'm really interested in this space and in my limited exposure, have not heard of anything where the law firm takes equity in the business. Usually a VC will pay the legal fees as part of the capital they provide in exchange for equity. Maybe if you were a solo or really small firm and there was no venture capital involved, but I don't know.

[Alex-Trof]

That's kind of what I was thinking. For some reason I know a lot of small business owners. They all use legal services and pay fees. I wouldn't mind working regular hours at a small firm and do this kind of thing completely on the side. Being an absentee owner even of a very small business sounds very attractive to me. Now I am not sure at all if going to T14 is good idea at all given these interests.

[dark]

Check out this unusual practice. 20 or so years ago, relatives of mine who set up a small business used the partner here. It looks like over the next decades, he focused on providing all sorts of legal services to small business. Certainly a percentage of the businesses he helped to set up or incorporate were successful, and then he was the go to guy for more substantial corporate legal work as the businesses grew.

http://www.indigoventure.com/index.php
http://www.indigoventure.com/services.html

[powerlawyer06]

A friend of my father went to a TTT but also has an accounting degree. He helps start ups and international companies reverse merge into defunct shell corps that are already publicly traded and registered with the SEC. There is a huge market for this because of the difficulty international corporations have with registering with the SEC. He keeps a percentage of the new entities as part of his fee (.1%) I think. He has made significant money holding shares in some of the corps. I believe one deal netted him 300k over the 18 months he held it.

I have looked into helping him but unless you can speak mandarin and japanese like him it is a hard market to crack.

[LettuceBeefRealTea]

A friend of my father went to a TTT but also has an accounting degree. He helps start ups and international companies reverse merge into defunct shell corps that are already publicly traded and registered with the SEC. There is a huge market for this because of the difficulty international corporations have with registering with the SEC. He keeps a percentage of the new entities as part of his fee (.1%) I think. He has made significant money holding shares in some of the corps. I believe one deal netted him 300k over the 18 months he held it.

I have looked into helping him but unless you can speak mandarin and japanese like him it is a hard market to crack.

yep. this is huge money.
i have an econ/math background and am an absentee small business owner, but i want to be able to do most of my own legal work and be able to have a high level of fluency to communicate with external and internal lawyers if my business grows or if i start a new one. i think this is the most profitable possible use of a law degree imo.

no mandarin or japanese though

[Alex-Trof]

Counting the number of responses, this field appears to be as viable and easy to break into as international human rights law.

[shotsfired12]

redacted.