Group #3 Start-ups
• The Wage Workaround: How Cash-Strapped Startups Compensate Employees
Tifani Sadek, University of Michigan Law School
This article confronts the reality that most startup businesses must pay their employees, including founders, minimum wages in cash but typically lack the revenue to do so. This article explores startups’ most common compensation practices, how those practices fare when scrutinized under existing wage and hour laws, and the ethics of the startup attorney in advising on and guiding those practices. The article ends with the exploration of possible and practical policy solutions to rectify the compensation conundrum that startups face.
• Hurtling Towards the Exit: Notes on a Poetics of Venture-Capital
Jonathan W. Smith, Washington University in St. Louis School of Law
This paper argues that corporate organizational documents are a particularly apt locus for examining the presence of narrative in transactional legal documents. I focus on one type of organizational document in particular – the charter for a venture-backed startup company -- to demonstrate how attention to narrative can illuminate the underlying logic of venture capital investment. More specifically, I argue that attention to narrative reveals that (a) like all stories, corporate charters create a framework that gives meaning to actions taken across time; (b) the semantic system established by corporate charters shapes the larger narratives through which members of the corporation understand themselves; and (c) like all stories, corporate charters generate momentum towards narrative endings, which serve as an ultimate horizon of meaning for readers of the story. In making this argument, the project contributes to an emerging body of scholarship within the Applied Legal Storytelling movement examining the role of narrative in transactional legal documents. In concert with such scholarship, the project seeks to show how a narrative understanding of corporate documents can enhance both pedagogy and lawyering with respect to startup companies. In addition, the project nudges such scholarship to consider the critical possibilities afforded by narrative analysis of transactional documents. Beyond making smarter and better corporate lawyers, attention to narrative structure and irony opens the possibility for a cultural criticism of corporate law. In this respect, the project urges a rapprochement between Applied Legal Storytelling scholarship and the critical theoretical analysis utilized by earlier scholars of legal narratives.