First, as a partner in a business that has Fortune 500 company paper reviewed approximately once a week (a typical MSA is ~10-15 pages long and includes insurance requirements, liability, indemnification, and IP ownership), I'm not sure I understand this idea that lawyers aren't good at reviewing other lawyers documents. In my experience, reviewing other lawyers documents is 99% of the job of a lawyer.
Second, we are commenting on a startup that purports to have taken the ideal DE C corp structure from Y Combinator and put a web interface on applying it to new companies. That strikes me as remarkably close to the "one true path" you refer to. They're lawyers. They did YC. What else are you asking for? I'm 1000x more likely to want to use them than a random BigFirm lawyer who will --- again --- charge me $15,000 to get a worse structure.
Everything you said is 100% correct. It all makes complete sense. But I'll repeat my initial point just so we're clear about what my problem here is:
A website is not going to ask you questions about the special nature of your desired business structure. If you need something special, you're better off asking a lawyer to help you with that. A good one. Maybe the ones who did this.
That's my point. I was commenting on someone who was ready to have his lawyer "review" the document; which in my experience is one step away from "I'll make some adjustments myself and see what my lawyer says" which is one step away from "I'll make some adjustments myself" and FILE.
And once you've locked in a structure, it's way more troublesome and expensive to fix it after the fact. That's my point.
Respectfully, I think this "special nature of your business" stuff is handwaving. Most tech startups are fundamentally the same company. I'm prepared to simply agree to disagree with you on this, though.
First, as a partner in a business that has Fortune 500 company paper reviewed approximately once a week (a typical MSA is ~10-15 pages long and includes insurance requirements, liability, indemnification, and IP ownership), I'm not sure I understand this idea that lawyers aren't good at reviewing other lawyers documents. In my experience, reviewing other lawyers documents is 99% of the job of a lawyer.
Second, we are commenting on a startup that purports to have taken the ideal DE C corp structure from Y Combinator and put a web interface on applying it to new companies. That strikes me as remarkably close to the "one true path" you refer to. They're lawyers. They did YC. What else are you asking for? I'm 1000x more likely to want to use them than a random BigFirm lawyer who will --- again --- charge me $15,000 to get a worse structure.
I'm with you on LLC all the way.