Use cases for founders and startups
Build the company on a legal foundation you understand and control.
The company needs legal infrastructure from the moment the founders divide ownership, contribute intellectual property, accept money, hire someone, promise a customer something, sign a vendor agreement, or give another person authority to act.
27 named situations in 6 groups
In this domain
Grouped by how they arrive.
A founder creates legal consequences from the first conversation about ownership through financing, hiring, commercial growth, governance, acquisition, succession, or wind-down. Together these situations show the operating pattern: establish the record, understand the choices, preserve control, execute deliberately, and remain ready for the next consequential moment.
Every use case for founders and startups
5 situations
Formation, ownership and founder control
- Proactive
The handshake before incorporation
Two founders have agreed to split the company evenly but have not decided vesting, roles, decision rights, departure consequences, or what happens at deadlock.
- Proactive
Control hidden inside ordinary paper
A founder focuses on valuation while voting thresholds, protective provisions, board composition, drag-along rights, and information rights quietly reshape who controls the company.
- Proactive
Contributions nobody documented
Code, a domain, customer relationships, cash, and prior work enter the company informally.
- Proactive
The cap table as a legal record
Equity promises live in email, a spreadsheet, and unsigned grant paperwork.
- Reactive
Founder departure before anyone planned for it
A founder leaves while holding unvested equity, company access, confidential information, and disputed IP.
5 situations
Fundraising and investor readiness
- Reactive
Understand the term sheet before the clock starts
A founder receives a short deadline and several interdependent economic and control terms.
- Proactive
The standing fundraising room
The company maintains a diligence-ready record before outreach begins.
- Reactive
Investor questions answered from the source
An investor asks about revenue concentration, IP ownership, a material contract, or the forecast.
- Proactive
Parallel diligence without disclosure sprawl
Several investors review the company at once with different access, expiration, and follow-up needs.
- Reactive
Closing as coordinated work
Financing documents, signatures, consents, conditions, and post-closing obligations cross founders, counsel, the board, and investors.
4 situations
People, equity and intellectual property
- Proactive
The first employee package
The company needs an offer, confidentiality and invention assignment, equity documents, and policy acknowledgments that reflect the choices the founder makes.
- Reactive
Contractors who built the product
Contractors built critical parts of the product before anyone signed an assignment.
- Proactive
Equity deadlines that outlive onboarding
Vesting, exercise, election, approval, and expiration dates are distributed across plans and grants.
- Proactive
A policy that has to work in practice
A handbook rule, security policy, approval process, or leave procedure affects several functions.
5 situations
Customers, vendors and routine agreements
- Proactive
A simple agreement from informed choices
The company needs an NDA, contractor agreement, statement of work, referral agreement, or other routine contract.
- Reactive
The customer paper that changes the risk
A customer substitutes its own MSA with broader indemnity, security commitments, service levels, or ownership terms.
- Proactive
Vendor obligations across functions
Procurement signs terms that create work for security, finance, privacy, legal, and operations.
- Proactive
Renewal before leverage disappears
An auto-renewal, termination window, price increase, or minimum commitment approaches.
- Proactive
One promise, several documents
Sales materials, the order form, MSA, security exhibit, privacy terms, and implementation plan describe the same commitment differently.
4 situations
Governance and cross-functional operations
- Proactive
The board room that remembers
Directors need the packet, prior decisions, approvals, conflicts, and open work without access to the entire company workspace.
- Proactive
Policies, procedures, and playbooks as operating intelligence
Leadership, people, finance, legal, security, sales, and operations each hold part of the answer.
- Reactive
The incident that tests the preparation
A security event, workplace complaint, customer escalation, regulatory inquiry, or business interruption activates several playbooks and agreements at once.
- Proactive or reactive
Professional judgment without surrendering the company record
Outside counsel, an accountant, a security advisor, or another specialist needs a defined slice of the issue.
4 situations
Diligence, acquisition, exit and wind-down
- Proactive
Diligence-ready before the buyer appears
A clean, answerable record allows the company to respond to an acquisition, financing, audit, or strategic partnership without weeks of reconstruction.
- Reactive
Change of control across the contract base
Customer, vendor, financing, lease, licensing, and equity documents contain different consent and termination consequences.
- Reactive
Founder, employee, and investor interests at exit
Waterfalls, preferences, acceleration, option treatment, retention, and board approval interact.
- Reactive
An orderly wind-down
The company must address employees, taxes, creditors, customers, vendors, data, assets, filings, and retained obligations in the correct sequence.
Through lines
What stays true across every situation here.
- The founder often discovers the missing agreement, approval, assignment, or control right when an investor, employee, customer, or acquirer supplies the deadline.
- The company record and the founder's personal legal life intersect without becoming one data set.
- The document you sign on day one governs the day you leave.
Start with the situation you are in, or the one you want to be ready for.
Join the waitlist and Briefcase will be in touch as access opens.
Pilots start as early as October 1, 2026.