Which startup paperwork can you file yourself, and which drafting choices bite back years later
Formation filings, an EIN and a registered agent are clerical work. Operating agreements, trademarks and client contracts are drafting decisions with a long tail.
One owner's working record of what an attorney was hired for, what got handled without one, and what the bills came to. Written down so the next person can skip the guessing.
Two categories, not six tasks
Six documents tend to show up in a company's first year, and they are not the same kind of task. Two are forms, where the state or the IRS asks for information it already knows how to process and the only real risk is a typo. One is a service you buy. Three are drafting, where the words chosen in a quiet month decide how an argument resolves four years later. A careful reader sorts them before spending anything, because the money saved on a form is real and the money saved on a document that governs ownership is usually borrowed against the future.
The articles of organization and the EIN are clerical
Filing articles of organization with the secretary of state is a short form: entity name, principal address, registered agent, organizer signature, and a fee that varies widely by state. An owner who can read the state's own instructions can do this, and thousands do. The EIN application through the IRS, which administers employer identification numbers, is free and takes minutes online. What a careful reader checks here is narrow and mechanical: that the name is actually available and not confusingly close to a registered mark, that the responsible party listed on the EIN is the person who should be, and that the filing confirmation is saved somewhere retrievable rather than left in an email account nobody controls.
Compare this with what a lawyer charges to do the same filing. The work is real but thin, usually a modest flat fee bundled into a formation package, and the value is in the surrounding advice rather than the typing. Where that advice earns its cost is entity choice: whether an LLC or an S corporation election fits the compensation plan, whether a second member changes the tax picture, whether the state of formation should match the state of operation. Those are conversations, not forms, and they can happen without hiring anyone to press submit.
A registered agent is a purchase, not a decision
Every state requires an address inside its borders where service of process can be delivered during business hours. An owner can name themselves if the address is stable and public exposure is acceptable, or buy a commercial agent for a low annual fee. The comparison worth making is between the modest recurring cost and the failure mode: a lawsuit served on a stale address, a default judgment entered because nobody opened the envelope, and the motion to vacate that follows. That motion costs more in attorney time than a decade of agent fees. The careful reader treats the agent as insurance against a mail failure, priced accordingly.
Operating agreements and trademarks carry a long tail
An operating agreement downloaded free and signed unread is where the trouble lives. It decides how a departing member is bought out, how the price is calculated, who breaks a deadlock, whether a spouse inherits voting rights, and what happens when one founder stops showing up. None of that matters until it matters entirely, and by then the document is fixed and the parties have opposing interests. What a careful reader checks: whether the template names a state whose law actually applies, whether the buyout formula produces a number anyone could compute, whether transfer restrictions exist at all. Rewriting later requires unanimous consent, which is exactly what a dispute has already destroyed.
Trademark applications sit in similar territory. Filing with the Patent and Trademark Office is a form, and the fee is published. The drafting is the goods and services description and the classes selected, which set the boundary of what the registration protects. Too narrow and a competitor operates alongside you legitimately; too broad and the examining attorney issues an office action, which is where the cheap application starts generating hourly bills. A clearance search before filing costs a fraction of a rebrand.
Client contracts are drafted once and used hundreds of times
A standard services agreement is the highest-leverage document a small company owns, because it repeats. One well-drafted template covering scope, payment terms, late fees, limitation of liability, intellectual property ownership and termination gets signed by every client for years. A lawyer's flat fee for that template is spread across all of them. The cheap version's cost arrives as a single unpaid invoice with no attorneys' fees clause, or a dispute over who owns the deliverable. Fixing it after the fact means litigating the ambiguity rather than editing it.
The sorting rule is durable. If the document only records facts the government already expects, file it yourself and keep the confirmation. If the document allocates money, ownership or control between people who currently agree, pay for the words.
EIN costs nothing. The IRS issues employer identification numbers free through its online application. Any service charging a fee for the EIN itself is charging for the typing.
Responsible party on the EIN. The application asks who the responsible party is, and that name follows the entity. Listing a departing co-founder or an outside bookkeeper creates a correction filing later.
Registered agent as insurance. The annual fee for a commercial agent is small relative to a default judgment entered because a summons went to an address nobody checks. Buy it for the reliability, not the privacy.