A bit of legal speak to start: By accessing this page you affirm that you’ve read and understood the contents of Free Forms and the Legal Notices sections of this site.
To continue …
There are many sources for free and inexpensive legal documents. One site that we’ve visited and enjoyed is operated by the Boston-based law firm of Goodwin Procter LLP. Their site for start-up documentation is foundersworkbench.com. Relatively inexpensive sources for a wide variety of agreements include onecle.com and tech agreements.com. While we can not claim credit or responsibility for the work of any of these sites we think you might find them useful or at least interesting.
Please remember that forms, even the best ones, are only starting places for creating what a client needs. Embedded in almost every form are specific choices, some of which are not very apparent and some of which are omissions, that were made for someone else and may not be right for the client. If you use or download a document posted on this site you understand, acknowledge and agree that neither Avenir Law nor any of its affiliates is rendering legal or other professional advice on any subject, including tax matters and is not a paid tax return preparer with respect to any of these documents. As we noted on the Free Forms page, before using or downloading any document posted on this site, we strongly recommend that you consult with your tax, accounting and/or legal advisors and, if appropriate, consider filing a Section 83(b) election with the United States Internal Revenue Service if any founder’s units or shares are subject to vesting and possible forfeiture.
Subject to the caveats above, the forms on foundersworkbench.com seem to us to be quite good as forms. And they’re free. We will post here other forms that we find interesting.
A simple, “plain English” agreement where the business terms are on an exhibit.
There are a few sets of “standard” funding documents out there. We haven’t reviewed them all, but they are probably worth reviewing. For example:
National Venture Capital Association: http://alturl.com/oxdjt
Y Combinator: http://ycombinator.com/seriesaa/
Techstars put up equity and debt documents done by Cooley LLP: http://www.techstars.com/docs/
A term sheet for “plain preferred” put up by Founder Institute: http://fi.co/posts/69
GitHub and Series Seed have put up a comprehensive set at: https://github.com/seriesseed/equity
And an intriguing list of international documents: http://seedsummit.org/legal-docs/
