

Ask HN: What do startups pay business attorneys for emails? - larrys

I&#x27;m wondering what startup&#x27;s experience has been with their business law and deal attorney charges specifically for emails, postal letters and&#x2F;or faxes.<p>Do they charge for each and every email or only emails over a certain length? What are typical charges for these items?
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tptacek
Usually, when you ask your lawyer to do something, you ask how many hours
you're going to incur, unless you don't care.

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larrys
I got bogged down the other day with 29 somewhat long emails in one day back
and forth for a negotiating project that I took on for a VC firm who I've
dealt with before. Handholding and explaing to all parties on issues that
weren't even related to the actual transaction in a sense. [1] Without that
handholding the deal would fall through (just closed today after another 30
emails). That's in addition to whatever happened over the past 6 weeks.
Plenty.

Specifically the emails didn't relate to negotiating issues they related to
things unrelated but needed to make sure the seller didn't back out.

I don't quote on an hourly basis (I like to go on "value") but in this case I
was curious whether I could build into my rate some way to protect myself by
using something that is somewhat familiar to people using attorneys already.
(Hence the request for feedback and basic framework...I know I always got
billed for letters from attorneys in the past..)

This is a side thing that I do essentially for fun however getting tied up in
emails all day kind of kills the fun.

[1] Example: How to use dig or nslookup to verify DNS records are setup
properly. Then explaining that you don't need to query both primary and
secondaries just one is fine. Sellers "tech guy" thought he had to verify 40
dns records on 4 different AWS servers and threw in the towel which literally
almost killed the whole deal.

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BorisMelnik
I had an attorney send a 6 sentence email to a stock photo company and he
charged me $325 which included 1 additional correspondence of a similar
length.

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kayhi
Most charge by time not by the number or type of interaction

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larrys
I know they charge by time I was wondering what the typical charges are that
are linked to emails.

For example if you email a question to your attorney and he emails back a 1
paragraph or 1 sentence response does that show up in billing as "email re:
clarification $75" etc.

