VALUE PROPOSITION
Bound Legal gets it. Building a company is hard. Growth and monetization happens when it happens (if it happens) and it's tough sledding all the way through. Bound Legal has a Thesis on how to provide differentiated legal and strategic services and formulated models for service delivery and fees (based on the pattern of legal needs common to the venture experience) but its fundamental value proposition is improvising its services to meet the specific, sometimes singular, situations of its clients.
FEE STRUCTURE
Bound Legal’s billing packages aim for transparency and price-predictability and include a flat fee subscription model, project-based pricing and hourly billing.
New clients subscribing to the general counsel service are generally charged a flat fee for the first month. This initial month is an exploratory phase and during this time the subscription covers all of the services a client receives from Bound Legal Strategy. Following the initial month a future monthly fee arrangement is set that can flex upwards or downwards on a month to month basis.
Non-ordinary course and stand-alone projects are available by transaction based fee in the following practice areas:
Capital raising (equity/debt)
Data privacy (CCPA/GDPR)
Fintech agreements or payments compliance
CLIENTS
Bound Legal Strategy has designed its service and delivery platform for founders and venture stage technology startups.
THESIS
Bound Legal Strategy is operated on the thesis that large firm (big law) legal services purchased by tech startups routinely misfit the organizational platform and risk profile that characterizes the typical startup. This applies most consistently to recurring, ordinary course operational issues (e.g., commercial transactions, employment issues, corporate governance, etc.) and predicts suboptiminal outcomes for short and long-term business performance. The primary problems are (1) the inefficient allocation of capital (Overbilling) and (2) organizational distraction from core strategic interests (Overlawyering).
Overbilling results from two inherent features of big law. First, big law fees are bundled. The firm’s network, real estate, brand name and insurance policies aren't line-itemed on invoices but are nonetheless part of what clients pay for, directly or indirectly. Second, the operations and process dimensions of a traditional hierarchical, leveraged firm partnership can constrain innovation, flexibility, and client responsiveness. Bound Legal sees itself as part of the set of alternative legal providers that are unbundling this model and creating a market for clients to choose what they want to pay for and accelerate efficiency developments on the delivery side.
The other problem - Overlawyering - arises from smart, highly trained legal minds assessing legal risk at arm’s length from the de facto challenges of building a business. This can result in the kind of boundless issue spotting, one-upmanship, conference calls and related feedback loops that give credence to truisms like “Startups don’t die from hammerblows; they die a death of a thousand cuts.” This can get exacerbated in emergent industries where established compliance / risk analyses or legal frameworks are applied to new technology.
The goal of Bound Legal Strategy is to better align the substance, delivery and fee structure of legal and related strategy services with the founder perspective and the individualized needs of a high growth company. We take as a premise that the real business of a startup is (some mix of) product innovation, culture building and customer acquisition and tightly integrate down side risk management practices around these fundamental business priorities. This smart practice is combined with low overhead and an agile approach to pricing and service delivery to provide right-sized solutions at reasonable rates.