Startup legal
- When to use it
- Legal groundwork for a startup that can't yet pay a lawyer for everything: an agreement checked before you sign it (blanks, broken cross-references, mismatched amounts, the renewal date, and the clauses that hurt a small company, with wording to ask for), your cap table modelled through SAFEs, notes and a priced round, vesting schedules with leavers, acceleration and the 83(b) deadline, and your first office lease turned into its real commitment and exit dates. Each says what is worth a lawyer's hour.
- Covers
- Handle the legal basics (4)
- Where you decide
- No gated loop of its own; the skills run one at a time.
- Size
- 9 skills · 0 loops
npx skilldrop-cli install --pack startup-legal
Installs 9 skills, including core.
Other ways to install
The pack's loops too, each as an invokable skill:
npx skilldrop-cli install --loop --pack startup-legal
In Claude Code, as a plugin (after /plugin marketplace add sananthanarayan/skilldrop):
/plugin install startup-legal@skilldrop
Into Cursor, Kiro or another IDE:
npx skilldrop-cli install --pack startup-legal --ide cursor
Start here: Check an agreement before you sign it
Paste this into your agent:
We're the customer in this SaaS agreement (agreement.docx), and the first year ends on 1 July 2027. Review it before I sign: what's broken, what should I push back on, and when do we have to give notice if we don't want it to renew?
- Before you start
- The agreement you've been sent, as a Word, Markdown or text file
- Python 3 on the machine, which the checks run on
- How to tell it worked
- contract-check opens with a verdict and the three things that matter most, lists each mechanical fault with its clause number (blanks, references to clauses or exhibits that don't exist, amounts whose words and figures disagree), gives wording to ask for on each clause that hurts you, and gives the renewal notice deadline as a date.
- If nothing happens
- If contract-check does not activate, ask for it by name ("use contract-check"). If your agreement is a PDF, save it as Word or text first.
A typical session
When: You're a founder without a lawyer on retainer, and an agreement, a round or a launch is coming.
You bring:
- the agreement you've been sent, or your own template
- your cap table, SAFEs and any term sheet
- grant documents for anyone with vesting shares or options
- the heads of terms or draft lease for an office
-
- You
- Give it the agreement and say which side you're on.
- You get
- A verdict, the fixes to ask for with wording, every mechanical fault with its clause, and the dates to diarise.
- You decide
- Sign, send the redline, or take the one flagged clause to a lawyer.
-
- You
- Give it your shareholders, SAFEs, notes and the term sheet.
- You get
- What each founder and investor owns after the round, what each SAFE converted at, and what the pool top-up cost you.
- You decide
- Which valuation and pool terms to negotiate for.
-
- You
- Give it each grant's shares, start date and terms, and any leaving date.
- You get
- Cliff and fully-vested dates, what is vested on any date, leaver outcomes, and the 83(b) deadline as an exact date.
-
- You
- Give it the heads of terms or the draft lease.
- You get
- What signing commits you to up to each break and to the end, every notice deadline as a date, and the clauses to push back on with wording.
- You decide
- Sign, negotiate, or take the guarantee or break clause to a lawyer.
You end with: Agreements you understand before signing, a cap table and vesting schedule you can defend, and an office lease whose cost and exits you know.
Compare Startup legal with another pack
Skills in this pack (4)
- cap-table Work out who owns what in a startup through its SAFEs, convertible notes and a priced round — each SAFE's and note's conversion price and whether its cap or discount applied, the price per share, the option-pool top-up and who it dilutes, the fully diluted cap table before and after, and founder ownership at other valuations — computed by a script that checks the post-money and the 100 % total. Use when a founder asks "how much of my company will I own after this round", "model our SAFEs converting", "what does this term sheet do to our cap table", "how much have I given away in SAFEs", or "compare a $12M and a $16M pre-money". standard
- contract-check Check an agreement before a founder signs or sends it — a script finds the mechanical faults a read-through misses (blanks left in, cross-references to clauses or exhibits that don't exist, numbering that skips, terms defined twice or used undefined, amounts in words that disagree with the figures, dates that don't exist, and the date notice must be given to stop an auto-renewal) — then reads it for the terms that hurt a small company: uncapped liability, one-sided indemnities, IP that leaves, exclusivity, auto-renewal, payment and termination traps. Use when a founder says "review this contract before I sign", "check this NDA / MSA / SaaS agreement / consulting agreement", "anything wrong with this agreement", "what should I push back on", or "is this ready to send". heavy
- lease-check Check a commercial lease before a startup signs it for its first office, studio or lab — a script turns the lease's terms into every date and sum the tenant must plan around (rent year by year through stepped rents, fixed and index-linked reviews with caps and collars, rent-free months, what the company is committed to pay up to each break and to the end, and each break, renewal and notice deadline as a date), then flags terms that can't all be true and deadlines already passed — and reads the lease for the clauses that hurt a small tenant. Use when a founder says "review this office lease", "what's our break clause notice date", "how much are we committing to on this lease", "check this lease before I sign", "when can we get out of this lease", or "what does the rent review do". standard
- vesting-schedule Work out vesting for founder stock, restricted stock, options and RSUs — each grant's cliff date and amount, every vesting date in whole shares, what is vested on any date, what happens when someone leaves (vested, forfeited or repurchasable, and the last day to exercise), single- and double-trigger acceleration on a sale, and the US 83(b) election deadline moved past weekends and holidays — computed by a script that keeps the totals exact. Use when a founder asks "how much has my co-founder vested", "what happens to her shares if she leaves", "when does the cliff hit", "build our vesting schedule", "when is the 83(b) deadline", or "what does double-trigger acceleration give us in a sale". standard
Included from core (5)
- brief-intake Turn raw mess — a Slack thread, meeting transcript, Jira ticket, half-written Notion page, email chain, or paragraph of free-form context — into a structured brief that the downstream skill (adr-generator, design-doc, runbook-generator, exec-summary, slide-outliner) can consume without further intake. Use whenever the user has unstructured source material and is about to invoke another skilldrop skill, or when a draft is missing the load-bearing context the next step will need. standard
- context-graph Map the decisions behind a codebase from its ADRs, RFCs and design records — each record's status and date, what supersedes or amends what, which records cite which, the files and folders each decision governs, and with git the commits that implemented it and the commits that changed each decision's code since it was made, and who made them — then answer "why is it like this?" from the record and check the record is still true. Finds supersessions only one side records, current decisions pointing at code that is gone, code that has drifted from its decision, two current decisions governing the same path, and references to records that don't exist. Use when the user asks "why do we use X", "which decisions govern this file or service", "is this ADR still current", "has the code drifted since we decided this", "are our ADRs out of date", "what was decided before I change this", wants a map of the architecture decisions, or is onboarding onto a codebase's history. standard
- council-review Convene a council of distinct senior-engineer personas (Architect, Security, Operator/SRE, Pragmatist, User-Advocate, plus optional bench seats) to deliberate a decision, design, or code change — each takes an independent stance, the genuine disagreements are surfaced as named cruxes, and a Chair issues a reconciled verdict that records dissents and states what would change the decision. The "Claude Council." Use when a choice has real tradeoffs and one reviewer's voice isn't enough: architecture decisions, risky changes before merge, RFC/design scrutiny, "should we adopt X?", rewrite-vs-refactor, or a pre-mortem. heavy
- doc-critique Review an existing document — ADR, design doc, runbook, exec summary, tech-comparison matrix, deck outline, decision log — and produce a structured critique against the same quality bars the skilldrop generators enforce. Categorizes findings by severity (blocker / major / minor / nit), points to the exact section/line, and suggests a concrete fix for each. Use when the user wants a second-pair-of-eyes review before sharing a doc, or has been handed someone else's artifact and wants to know what to push back on. heavy
- output-hygiene Review agent-written text before it ships and strip the machine artifacts it carries — invisible Unicode, non-breaking spaces, homoglyphs, harness-added provenance trailers, trailing chat closers — then flag the prose tells a script cannot catch, each quoted with a rewrite. Use when the user wants to clean up AI-generated output, asks to remove a Claude watermark, attribution footer, or "Generated with" line, wants a draft that does not read as machine-written, or needs a pre-ship hygiene pass on a document, commit message, or pasted chat answer. light