Legal Literacy: The New Startup Currency

Jan de Vries · 2026-07-03

For most of the last decade, legal has been the thing founders put off. You raise a round, you sign a stack of documents you half-read, and you tell yourself you'll sort the legal stuff out properly once you can afford a lawyer. Legal sits in the same mental bucket as a nice office or a finance team: a sign you've made it, not something you do yourself. I think that mental model is quietly breaking, and the teams breaking it are the ones moving fastest. Here's what I keep seeing. The leanest companies aren't waiting until they can hire a general counsel. They're bringing routine legal work in-house far earlier than that, but not by hiring lawyers at all. They're equipping the people they already have – the commercial and operations folks – to handle the bread-and-butter legal work themselves. Legal is shifting from something you buy to something you build internally. And, I'd argue it's becoming a core founder and operator skill in the same way that basic finance or basic hiring already are. ### Why this is happening now A few things have changed at once. The first is cost and speed, which were always the real problem. If you're a 40-person company selling complex services, you might sign a few hundred contracts a year: NDAs, sales agreements, data processing addenda, supplier terms, consultancy agreements. None of them are individually hard. But routing every one of them to an external firm at $400 an hour, or letting them sit in a queue for nine days, is how you lose deals. I've watched companies nearly lose customers because an NDA got stuck in legal review. That's an absurd reason to lose revenue, and founders are increasingly unwilling to accept it. The second is that the work itself is more repeatable than the profession likes to admit. A genuinely large share of the contracts a growing company signs are the same document with different names on it. The job isn't bespoke legal reasoning. It's applying a consistent position, spotting the handful of clauses that actually matter, and getting to signature. That is a process, and processes can be owned by smart non-lawyers given the right tools and guardrails. The third is that the tooling finally caught up. For years, the LegalTech category mostly meant a better place to store your PDFs, or a search bar with a chatbot bolted on. That's not the same as something that can actually draft, review against your standard positions, and flag the bits a human needs to look at. The gap between "I need a lawyer for this" and "I can handle this myself" has narrowed a lot, and it's still narrowing. Put those together and you get a real shift. The bottleneck was never that founders couldn't understand a mutual NDA. It was that doing legal yourself used to be slow, risky, and lonely. Less so now. ### What teams can reasonably own I want to be precise here, because "do your own legal" is exactly the kind of advice that gets people into trouble when applied carelessly. The work that teams can sensibly own is high-volume, low-variance, and well-understood: - NDAs in both directions - Standard sales contracts where you're the one setting the terms - Order forms and renewals - Straightforward supplier and vendor agreements - Basic employment and contractor paperwork off a known template - Data processing agreements that now ride along with almost every B2B deal This is the long tail of legal admin that eats hours and rarely needs genuine judgement but just consistency and a clear playbook. The trick that makes this safe is the playbook. Before anyone on a commercial team touches a contract, someone senior, often with a lawyer's input once, needs to decide the standard positions: what you'll accept, what you'll push back on, where your hard lines are. Once that exists, applying it is an operations task, not a legal one. The expensive legal brain is spent setting the rules, and the day-to-day is spent following them. That's how you turn legal from a bottleneck into a lever for growth. ### The bottom line Legal literacy isn't about becoming a lawyer. It's about understanding enough to move fast without breaking things. For startups in 2025, that's not just nice to have – it's becoming the currency that separates the fast from the stuck.