Startup lawyers who actually get founders

Three trigger points:

1. you’re forming a multi-founder company – get a shareholders agreement before any disagreement happens;
2. you’re about to issue employee equity – the ESOP needs to be lawyer-drafted to be enforceable;
3. you’re about to take outside capital – investors will ask for IP assignment, cap-table review, and proper investor documents.
   

Before those trigger points, templates and the Lawpath Essentials Plan are usually fine.

Most 2-3 founder shareholders agreements at Lawpath sit between $1,600 and $3,000 fixed-price (plus GST) and it’s subject to change each financial year. Complex multi-class structures or those involving investors run higher. The cost of doing it now is a fraction of the cost of unwinding a founder dispute without one — even Y Combinator’s standard advice is ‘always get a shareholders agreement’.

Vesting means each founder’s shares are subject to a forfeiture schedule — typically 4 years with a 1-year cliff. If a founder leaves before vesting is complete, the company gets their unvested shares back. It protects the founders who stay and is standard practice in any company that plans to take outside investment.

Yes. Anything you built before incorporating sits in your personal name by default — including code, brand, customer lists, designs. Investors and acquirers will require all IP to be inside the company. A lawyer-drafted IP assignment deed moves it across properly; templates often miss key clauses around moral rights, derivative works, and joint-IP situations.

An Employee Share Option Plan is a framework for issuing equity (options, restricted shares) to employees. You need one before issuing the first employee equity grant. The plan needs board approval, must comply with the Corporations Act and ATO ESS rules, and may qualify for the ESS start-up tax concession if eligibility conditions are met (this can be confirmed by Lawpath Tax and Advisory).

Both are early-stage instruments to take in capital without setting a valuation SAFEs are simpler and avoid debt-style interest and maturity, while convertible notes are debt instruments Convertible Notes are debt instruments with interest and maturity. In Australia, SAFEs are now well-understood by sophisticated investors; for first-time investors a convertible note may be more familiar. Talk to a startup lawyer to model both for your specific raise.

Yes – we provide term sheet review, SAFE/CN drafting, investor agreement negotiation, and cap-table modelling. We don’t act as your investment bank or placement agent (we’re a law firm, not a corporate advisor), but for the legal documents and structure, we handle it end-to-end.

If you’re still pre-formation, start with our company registration service and our business structure quiz. Many founder-stage legal questions (which entity type, share structure, who owns what) need to be answered before you incorporate, not after. Once the company is set up, come back for the shareholders agreement, IP assignment, and ESOP work.