Venture Capitalist Slams Lawyers in Blog Harangue
A lawyer and venture capitalist rails against rising lawyer salaries and the big legal bills they produce in a 1,120-word blog harangue.
Jason Mendelson, a lawyer and venture capitalist with the Foundry Group and Mobius Venture Capital, compares his starting lawyer salary of $71,000 in 1998 with today’s paychecks and declares that salaries and bonuses have risen 132 percent in a decade, the Recorder reports.
“I’ve been working on a thesis for quite some time that the entire business model of law firms is going to have to change,” he wrote, “or it’s going to get uglier.”
Mendelson says law firms are overlawyering simple venture capital deals and charging too much money for the work. In one case, his firm was billed $72,000 for legal work for a first round of financing. Financings are “largely cookie-cutter,” Mendelson writes, yet he found himself working to negotiate “stupid boilerplate language that no one really cares about. …. Why can’t lawyers know when to leave well enough alone and not feel like every piece of paper needs a markup?”
He later told the Recorder in an interview that he wrote the post because of his growing frustration. “There were a few things that happened in the last few months that were sort of the last straw,” he said.
Updated at 12:59 p.m. to indicate that Mendelson earned $71,000 in 1998.
