[chiph]

In the case of the LLC some friends and I had a few years ago, we got a recommendation for a local firm from the lawyer father-in-law of the co-founders (he was out of state, and the relationship meant he had a conflict of interest and thus couldn't represent us himself). Big name, nice downtown office. Which should have been a warning sign...

We had some questions about IP ownership in our day-job employee agreements and asked the firm for an opinion. Rather than a simple one or two sentence answer/explanation, we ended up with 3 of their people on a conference call, one of whom simply read that portion of the agreement back to us. And then got handed a $2400 bill for services rendered.

Pick your lawyer almost as carefully as you pick a co-founder.