Affordable Lawyers to Review Contracts San Francisco

Speaking as both a business person and a lawyer, I have some advice following up Rob's Gropper's comment.  Rob is correct that there ought to be a market for less expensive legal services, and I'd say that the majority of lawyers in this country are overpriced (they, of course, would never consider that to be true; they are worth $10/minute!). But...

Caution: Entrepreneurs - be careful about using recent law school graduates or solo practitioners with only a few years of experience. Law school teaches some basic legal principles, but mostly it teaches students how to think like a lawyer and how to research and learn about specific legal issues. It takes years of work in a specific practice area (securities, contracts, employment, etc.) for a lawyer to gain the expertise you want, so they can accurately advise you, answer questions, or review documents, without lots of research, along with a hope and a prayer they are correct.

Here is a sign. If a lawyer still writes numbers as "one hundred twenty (120)," find another lawyer. There is absolutely no legitimate reason to write numbers that way, except that it is the way lawyers have been writing numbers since about 1600 A.D, and it is the way lawyers are taught to write. It quickly demonstrates that they are too tradition bound for your business.

Rob, I sort of agree with you, but the reality is that most if not all lawyers don't bill all their worked hours, unlike, say, IT consultants (who typically charge at much lower rates).

Don't ask me why, because I've argued with my wife quite a bit about it. It doesn't make sense to me to have  rates that can seem outrageous but then actually work twice or thrice as much as actually billed, but that's the reality for most lawyers. Of course, there are sometimes egregious abuses (such as Bromwich charging Apple $1,100/hr and over $138,000 for... 2 weeks of work cf. http://www.insidecounsel.com/2013/12/02/apple-claims-court-appointed-e-book-monitor-is-ove ) but I don't think they're the rule. And I can tell you that my wife is far from doing $400K a year (I wouldn't be working as hard as I do if that was the case!) and yet she does work every single day.

Furthermore, among lawyers there is a strong sense of devaluing your own work and be considered unworthy if you charge too little.

And since there was a recent blog post about pricing for SaaS businesses, I should point out that us entrepreneurs usually do a pretty bad job at finding a good balance between value proposition and value perception (a distinction I recently learnt about at http://sixteenventures.com/how-to-price-your-saas-or-web-app-the-basics and http://sixteenventures.com/how-to-price-your-saas-or-web-app-advanced ). Maybe lawyers are better at that than we are? ;-)

Raphael Londner, I have to disagree about how "most lawyers" bill. I have had law partners who have billed: (1) more than 24 hours in a day, (2) .3 hours (18 minutes) for EVERY phone call or other brief interaction, meaning that three five-minute phone calls with three clients amounted to 54 minutes of billable time; and (3) bill time on an airplane to the client for whom they are flying while billing the same time to another client for whom they are doing work while sitting on the plane.

Your wife is very reasonable/generous!