Startup Legal Checklist
Terms, privacy, employment, IP assignment, and data protection.
“Legal is the seatbelt you click before the crash, not after. The founders who wait to get hit first are the ones who never recover the cap table.”
The Insight
At Stage 1, legal debt compounds silently. Every contractor without an IP agreement, every customer without proper terms, every employee without a written offer adds a future landmine. The cost to fix later is 10x to 100x the cost to do it right now — and the time when fixing becomes existential is always the worst possible time.
01
The Customer-Facing Basics
Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, live on the website, written for your specific business (templates from Termly or SimpleServe are fine at this stage — customise the scope, not the boilerplate). Done once, reviewed annually, refreshed when you cross 1,000 users or £1M ARR.
02
The Team-Facing Basics
Every employee has a written offer letter and employment contract. Every contractor has an IP-assignment agreement signed before they open the codebase. Every founder has a shareholders' agreement. Every equity grant is papered, vested, and logged.
03
The Insurances and the Unsexy Compliance
The Takeaway
Legal is not a brake — it's a foundation. Do the boring work in one focused month, document everything, and sleep the sound sleep of the founder whose cap table is clean.
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