Finding a Lawyer for Your Startup
A little over a year ago I was faced with finding a lawyer to help get the business formed. Having grown up with a lawyer for a father (or perhaps I should say a father for a lawyer) it was ingrained in my mind that it's extremely important to get professional legal advice with just about anything you do. Spending a few hundred dollars now can save you thousands of dollars later, plus you'll save yourself a lot of frustration and anxiety. So the trouble was finding legal counsel in the Seattle area. My father wasn't going to cut it since he doesn't practice in Washington. His advice was to use Martindale-Hubbell's Lawyers.com. If it wasn't for his suggestion, I probably would never have used the site. Not because I didn't know about it, but because a site with that name seems to me like a source for cheesy ambulance chasing personal injury lawyers. Maybe it had something to do with billboards they used to run near Hobby airport in Houston. Using the site I narrowed down the list to about 5 firms in Seattle (here's a link to the small business category). I contacted each via email rather than phone in an effort to weed out firms that might be significantly behind the times. I got about three responses by the next day and never heard from the other two. After explaining my situation and the services I thought I needed I got quotes from all three. To form a single member LLC including any state and local registration fees I was quoted $2200, $1700 and $700. The larger quotes were from small-to-medium sized firms with about 5 or so lawyers. The $700 quote was from a single lawyer firm (she had an assistant). I had been advised by my father to expect the cost to be around $500 as the work generally requires filling out standard documents and can lead to more work for the lawyer down the road. So that left the single lawyer firm, which also might be an advantage because she might be more in-tune with the issues facing a small business. I called her office number and got the voicemail for her cell phone. To me that just seemed to short sited. When a business uses a cell phone as their main number it just doesn't seem right, especially for a lawyer. This brought me back to square one. I decided that restricting my search to Seattle meant I was getting only downtown firms, and I'd have to pay downtown prices. By expanding my search to the nearby suburbs I got much better results. Lower quotes and firms that dealt with internet related businesses. Therefore my advice is if you're in a major urban area look for a lawyer in the burbs, find someone with clients in your field and do you're best to ensure their reputable. Oh, and in case you're wondering I went with Zeno, Drake and Hively in Kirkland.
- posted by Drew @ 11:54 PM