Ask HN: Legal resources for startups?

18 points by DarkShikari ↗ HN
The answer to so many questions is "speak with a lawyer", but how does one find a good lawyer for a particular field in the first place? For example, to write a proprietary software license agreement to find some particular need, one needs a copyright lawyer--but what's the best way for a startup to find such a lawyer? There seems to be very limited resources on this topic (or perhaps I'm blind).

Particularly, the kind of services I'm looking for:

1) Writing a bulletproof contributory license agreement (CLA) for dual-licensing an open source project.

2) Writing a proprietary license agreement (the "dual" part of the dual license).

Enough of this is custom enough that I imagine it would be a very bad idea to try to simply rip the legalese from an existing license, but I'm not sure where to start with regards to finding and contacting an experienced lawyer.

Additionally, I'm not familiar enough with IP lawyers to know how much such services might cost--$2,000? $10,000? $50,000? I'd like to know what to expect before jumping into this, but I have no experience in the field.

3 comments

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I've had some friends who have had success using DocStoc's DocStore: http://www.docstoc.com/store/

They seem to have some number of legal documents such as "Trademark License Agreement" and "Letter of Intent for Business Transactions." I cannot attest to their quality though.

Thanks to #startups, I ended up contacting http://www.moglenravicher.com/ about this--they're apparently the for-profit arm of the SFLC and provide legal services to for-profit FOSS projects--exactly what we need.

Hopefully they will be able to help.