Finding a web friendly lawyer

March 9, 2009 9:13 PM

I make web sites and created a web app for a client and now they want to own the copyright in exchange for equity. Help me find a New York based web friendly lawyer to ensure the new contract protects me. Tips are also appreciated on a fair equity percentage to ask for.
posted by avex to law & government (3 comments total)

I'm not entirely sure that you really need a "web friendly" lawyer here. You just need an intellectual property lawyer. There's nothing unique or special about the fact that this copyrighted material happens to be a web app.

You have some intellectual property that you are interested in exchanging for equity in some entity or enterprise.

It might be different if you were trying to sue someone for violating your copyright -- you might want your lawyer to be familiar with the technology being used -- but in this case, any competent, experienced intellectual property attorney will do a good job for you.

This is especially true if the agreement is as straight-forward as wanting to assign all of your rights to the web app in exchange for some flat percentage of equity in a company. If that's the case, you probably don't even need an IP attorney.

Anyway, the point is, if you're going to find a specialist, you want to get the specialty to be in the most legally complicated or nuanced part of your issue. That might be the IP part, it might be the equity part, but it's almost certainly not the internet part.

As for the equity percentage to ask for, it depends entirely on what the equity would be in . . . are we talking about owning part of the company? Owning part of a sub-corporation housing just the web-app? Something else? It also depends on the "value" of the web app. If it was something any high schooler could do in a weekend, you're probably not getting 25% equity in some multi-national mega-corp.

On the other hand, if it was a very difficult or laborious piece of code (and it was done well), getting 1% of some doomed-to-fail upstart might not be such a great deal.
posted by toomuchpete at 10:10 PM on March 9

Renee Duff of Lackenbach Siegel, Intellectual Property attorneys in Scarsdale, NY.
posted by camworld at 7:09 AM on March 10

If you think you need two lawyers ("intellectual property" and "web friendly"), here's some bad news: you need somebody with a lot of business savvy as well. If they're giving you a part of the company (in stock, for example) you will need to evaluate how much that stock will be worth. You will have to guess how successful their business plan is going to be, because in 9 out of 10 of these deals you will never see a penny, because the idea will fail in the market.

If you can afford to work for zero payment with a very, very small chance of getting lots of money later, you can do this deal, and it won't really matter how much equity you'll get.

If there's any chance that you will be able to re-use the copyright for this work in a later project, and that later project will pay you actual money instead of equity, I would choose to keep the copyright, and go for the much better odds of getting money from future projects.
posted by DreamerFi at 7:42 AM on March 10