Working with Our Legal Eagles

This information is for folks whose responsibilities extend to dealing with legal agreements. Our lawyers work for the company, not individuals (obvious, but let’s not have confusion).

We don’t have an in-house legal team. Be mindful that our outside lawyers are expensive. Please try to make sure that you’re using them for the right questions, and do your homework so we’re not using our paid legal just to get background information. If “homework” needs to include legal 411, we have access to legal open office via our accelerators.

When you do have an open legal matter:

Please make sure you’re surfacing the work on Slack
Set deadlines (asking for ETA first from the lawyer) and actively project manage them. We’re probably not the biggest fish on their plate, so be a squeaky wheel.
Make sure you’re keeping track of document versions (e.g. ask for dated blackline pdfs, or try to get the lawyer to work in our Google Drive with track-changes)
Keep documents in the correct Shared Drive. Definitely do not work locally on your computer or in your own gDrive.

Our lawyers are generally “refugees from BigLaw”: this means they were top of their law classes; on the other hand, there are a lot of lawyers in biglaw, so surely there’s a normal distribution happening among them. At any rate, like doctors, they’re all trained up to their eyeballs before they are allowed to open you up, and like probably all smart people, they will give you an opinion if you ask for one. Make sure that you are clear on whether they are giving you legal or business advice. If you’re unclear if the discussion is creeping into business decisions, ask point blank: “Is this a business decision?” Absolutely DO NOT relinquish business decisions to the legal team; get their advice, then make your decision and own it.

Corporate Legal

Corporate Legal primarily focuses on matters related to the internal governance, structure, and operation of corporations. This includes:

Corporate formation and maintenance
Shareholder agreements and rights
Board governance and compliance
Securities regulations and filings
Mergers and acquisitions, corporate restructuring, etc.
Corporate policies and procedures
Director and officer liability

Legal - Restricted Shared Drive

Optimal

Our corporate law firm is Optimal Counsel. They specialize in startups and only represent startups, unlike many other startup lawyers, who represent both startups and venture capital firms.

Relationship manager is José Ancer. We also work with a few other lawyers, but Jose should be cc’d on emails that request new work. Check Hubspot for other contacts at the firm.
Optimal’s Optimal Client Help Center has a lot of helpful content.
Shared documents are in Box

Commercial Legal

Commercial Legal deals with business transactions and relationships between entities. This includes:

Contract drafting and negotiation
Sales and distribution agreements
Licensing agreements
Supply chain contracts
Partnership agreements
Non-disclosure agreements (NDAs)
Intellectual property transactions
Commercial dispute resolution

Legal - Contracts Shared Drive

Smith Gambrell Russell

We have a shared Slack channel #ext_sgr-law with Brett and Patrick
Because SGR has a healthy real estate practice in NYC, if our counterparty is a NY real estate organization, SGR will need the exact name of the corporate entity so they can do a conflicts check.
Strategic commercial stuff that requires new forms and lots of discussion will go to SGR via Patrick. This category is basically anything other than our usual customer contracts — including employment law. Just so we don’t get surprised, please get an estimate for the work at the start.

POC: Patrick Tierney

And we pay them good money.

Find our law firm engagement letters in the Google Drive.

Optimal
Jose Ancer, Partner	$500
Other lawyers	$190 - $650
Paralegals and interns	$175 - 240
Smith, Gambrell & Russell (SGR)
Brett Lockwood, Partner	$745
Patrick R. Tierney, Partner	$720

Our Former Lawyers

Different people and firms have different working styles. These folks did not work out for us, you may see their names on drafts of documents (and their work lives on in our legacy contracts):

We used Kristin Kreuder at Outside GC in 2022. Outside GC was a referral from Su Sanni at Dollaride.

From formation to Dec. 2022, our start-up law firm was Reitler Kailas & Rosenblatt LLP (RKR). Our counsel was Prudence Thiry and our partner was Ed Reitler. RKR was a referral from Ross Goldenberg, co-founder of SiteCompli.

Some of our template docs (forms) were drafted by Mercedes Vescovi (MBV) in Jan/Feb 2022. We don’t have active work with her at this time. MVB was a referral from Seth Dotterer, CEO of SiteCompli.