Introducing Business Docs: The Smart Legal Form Library for Small Businesses, Startups, and Growing Companies

If you own or help manage a small business, startup, or growing company, you know what it’s like to work without the same resources used by large corporations. Fortune 500 companies have large dedicated legal departments, and those legal departments each have an expansive legal form library they can pull from for the common legal scenarios they encounter. But what about small business legal documents?

Wouldn’t it be great if small companies didn’t need to reinvent the wheel in building their own legal form library? SixFifty’s new Business Docs is the first smart legal form library developed specifically for small companies. Business Docs functions as a law firm alternative for companies with no in-house counsel, and as a “GC toolkit” for companies with a solo general counsel or small legal department. With SixFifty’s Business Docs, you can spend less time and fewer resources on legal work while getting better legal results and protections for your growing company.

Why small companies need good legal documents

If you’re a company owner or executive, it is likely you have two overarching goals:

1. Grow your company
2. Protect your company

While legal work does not always directly contribute toward the growth of a company, getting a company’s legal work right is vital to the protection of the company’s assets and business interests. Without good legal documents tailored to the needs of your company, your company will be exposed to potential legal liabilities that could easily have been prevented with a properly drafted legal document. When done correctly, legal expenditures are an invaluable investment in protecting your company.

The status quo for getting good legal documents

When it comes to legal work, companies are generally faced with choosing one of the following options:

1. Hire an expensive law firm. If you want to make sure you do your legal work correctly, hiring a law firm can be a good option. By engaging experienced legal counsel for your legal needs, you can generally be confident the work will be performed correctly and will sufficiently address your company’s needs. However, hiring a law firm can quickly become prohibitively expensive. The turnaround time at law firms can also be slow, and sometimes the attorneys drafting your documents at the law firm may not be familiar with the intricacies of your company’s needs that can be difficult to articulate and reflect in the drafted document. These shortcomings often leave companies looking into law-firm alternatives.
2. Draft the document yourself. If you don’t have in-house counsel at your company, you may consider drafting the legal document yourself. If it is a routine or simple change you are already familiar with, this can be a good option. Drafting documents on your own for simple matters where complex legal concepts are not involved can be a good option for companies to save on legal expenses where work or review by an attorney is not necessary. However, every experienced attorney can attest to the many hidden pitfalls clients often inadvertently walk into when doing their own legal work. When in doubt, when doing your own legal work, you should always have an attorney at least review your work to ensure you aren’t failing to address important legal considerations.
3. Hire (additional) in-house legal counsel. Companies with a significant amount of legal work wanting to mitigate law-firm fees frequently consider hiring in-house counsel. This can be a great option for your company if you have a steady and predictable legal workflow. By hiring in-house counsel, your in-house attorneys will become familiar with the goals, parameters, and intricacies of your company which will help them really dial in your legal documents to address your company’s needs. Occasionally, companies with in-house legal counsel still need to retain outside counsel when an expert is required in a particular area, or if the legal workload is exceeding the bandwidth of the in-house team, but generally hiring in-house legal counsel can be a great move for growing companies.

Each of these options has its pros and cons, and typically companies will use a mix of these options when addressing the company’s legal needs. SixFifty’s Business Docs adds another option into the mix that will enhance your company’s current legal solutions.

Smart legal document generators vs. static legal document templates

There are no great options for free or low-cost online document templates. It is especially difficult to find legal forms that are tailored to your company’s legal needs, jurisdiction, and industry. This can leave you with either using a sub-par legal form, or throwing in the towel and paying a law firm to do the work, even though it seems that will be like getting a jackhammer to hammer in a nail. Why are good, affordable legal forms so difficult to find?

The problem is that legal forms usually come by way of a static legal template—i.e., a Word document with blank spaces that you can fill in. These legal templates attempt to be a “one size fits all” solution. But more often than not, a static legal template found online falls short of adequately protecting the company using it. By using a legal document template that isn’t tailored to the needs of your company, you risk overlooking significant legal issues that need to be addressed, or legal language that should be included. This can result in protracted document negotiations, if the other side engages legal counsel and marks up your form with requested revisions. Even worse, if the problems go unnoticed, your written agreement can fail to protect your company if ever a dispute arises between the parties.

How Business Docs will help your company

SixFifty’s Business Docs is a turnkey legal form library for companies of every size. Unlike static legal form templates, SixFifty’s Business Docs is comprised of smart legal document generators that quickly create legal documents tailored to the needs of your company. SixFifty’s Business Docs includes:

• Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs)
• Advisor, Consulting, and Contractor Agreements
• Common Commercial Agreements
• Website Terms of Use and Privacy Policy
• Amendments, Notices, and Consents
• Governance, Equity, and Finance Agreements
• Contract Provision Generators

Does your company have a solo general counsel or small legal department? SixFifty’s Business Docs make in-house legal teams more efficient by spending less time on routine document generation and more time focusing on unique legal issues.

Does your company already have legal forms you are currently using? SixFifty’s Business Docs will help supplement your current legal form library to have the right form on-hand when the need arises.

How to get started with Business Docs

Creating compliant, customized legal documents couldn’t be easier when you have SixFifty in your corner. Just answer questions about your business to generate your top-tier legal documents. With a Business Docs subscription, you have access to our entire suite of expert-level document generators and a team of top lawyers who continuously monitor new and changing laws to ensure that our tools are always up to date. We’ll notify you whenever we update our tools so you can be sure that your documents are always compliant with current laws.

Or, if you just need one or two individual documents, our Marketplace houses all of the documents in a Business Docs subscription, à la carte. Visit the Marketplace today and generate a completely free NDA! It’s our gift to you.

Request a demo to check out Business Docs or get a tour of the Marketplace.