How we work

Four principles.

What separates counsel that ships from counsel that stalls. We publish these so you can hold us to them.

Counsel that reads your codebase.

We do not translate your product into a legal fantasy of your product. We read the repo, the model card, and the eval, and we advise on what is actually shipping. The advice you receive is grounded in the artifact, not the pitch deck.

In practice. Every engagement begins with a working session on your product. We ask for read access to the relevant repos, the current system prompt, one recent eval report, and your last three customer complaints. Everything downstream is calibrated to what we see there.

Contracts as source, not scripture.

Our agreements are diffable, version-controlled, and written for redline. Change requests get responses in hours, not billing cycles. We treat every contract as a living artifact that has to survive your customers, not just your first close.

In practice. We keep your contract stack in a shared workspace with change history you can inspect. Every clause has a rationale note. When a customer redlines, we return a marked-up response and a plain-English summary you can forward to a non-lawyer.

Risk sized to the business.

An early-stage AI startup does not need the risk posture of a bank. We tell you the risk you have, the risk you should ignore, and the two you should not. We refuse to sell fear as a growth strategy.

In practice. Every advice memo we write ends with an explicit ranking: what to fix this week, what to fix this quarter, and what to explicitly defer. We revisit deferred items every quarter and either close them or explain why they still wait.

Flat retainers, not the meter.

Most engagements are fixed monthly. You should never hesitate to send a two-line question because the clock is running. We keep the roster small so retainer clients get named attention, not associate rotation.

In practice. Retainer scope is written out in one page. Hourly work is rare, always disclosed in advance, and always capped. When the scope shifts, we say so before the invoice.

Cadence

A typical retainer month.

This is not a menu. It is the working rhythm most retainer clients settle into within the first sixty days.

Monday intake. Async triage of everything that landed over the weekend - customer redlines, incident notes, hiring questions, roadmap changes. Anything urgent gets a same-day answer.
Weekly working session. Thirty minutes on video with the lead attorney and your point of contact. Agenda is written in the shared workspace by Monday afternoon.
Rolling redlines. Live contract negotiations are returned within one business day of receipt. Complex enterprise deals get a written strategy note before the redline.
Product review. Every second week, we read what shipped: prompts, evals, marketing pages, changelog. We flag anything that has drifted from what we papered.
Month-end memo. One page summarizing what closed, what is pending, what got deferred, and what to expect next month. Sent before the invoice.

Tools

Where the work lives.

We meet you where you are. We do not force a new stack on the client just because our tools like it better.

Shared workspace

A single Notion, Coda, or GitHub-backed workspace holds contracts, memos, and a running log of decisions. Every artifact has an owner and a version history. You keep read access after we finish the engagement.

Contract stack in version control

Where the team is technical enough to want it, the entire contract stack lives in a git repo. Redlines are diffs. Approvals are PRs. Templates upgrade the way code does.

Async by default

We work async by default and default to video only when the question needs it. You should never have to schedule a call to get a short answer.

Response SLAs in writing

Same-day acknowledgment. One business day for substantive response on routine matters. Faster on live deals, incidents, and time-sensitive filings, spelled out in the engagement letter.

Engage

Ready to work this way?

Send us an intake. We reply within one business day, and we scope the retainer in writing before you sign.

Start an intake