

Ask HN: Legal resources for startups? - DarkShikari

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).<p>Particularly, the kind of services I'm looking for:<p>1) Writing a bulletproof contributory license agreement (CLA) for dual-licensing an open source project.<p>2) Writing a proprietary license agreement (the "dual" part of the dual license).<p>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.<p>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.
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DarkShikari
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.

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teej
[http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive#t...](http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive#toc27)

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vibhavs
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.

