Prepared for {{Program}}
Your companies fail
diligence after
they leave you.
Six to nine months out, a founder discovers a contractor owns part of the codebase, or nobody ever signed an IP assignment, or the cap table in the deck doesn't match the stock ledger. The deal stalls. It reflects on your program.
The Diligence Gap Assessment
Twelve questions across formation and governance, founder equity, and IP chain of title. Founders get a scored result immediately — no call required, no gate, no cost.
It is built to be run early, before a term sheet exists, when the problems are still cheap to fix. Cleaning up a missing IP assignment during formation is routine. Cleaning it up during diligence, with an investor watching, is not.
| Questions | Time | Cost | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| 12 | 4 min | Free | Immediate |
{{program}}’s Link
This link is yours. It is permanent, it never expires, and it tells us the assessment came from your program so we can build your cohort report. Use it anywhere.
{{LINK}}
Ready to paste
Written so you don't have to write anything. Tap copy, drop it in, done. The blocks are grouped by when they land, not by what they are — put each one where it belongs in your calendar and nobody has to choose.
Week One — onboarding
COhort kickoff message
Slack, Discord, cohort email
Do this in your first week, before you're busy.
Twelve questions on the things that stall diligence later: formation documents, founder equity, and whether the company actually owns its IP. Four minutes, scored result on the spot, no cost.
Everything it finds is cheap to fix now and expensive to fix once an investor is reading it. {{LINK}}
Before the first raise
Onboarding checklist item
Week-one tasks, program handbook
[ ] Complete the Diligence Gap Assessment and bring your score to your first mentor session.
{{LINK}}
Resource page row
Notion, Airtable, perks page
Diligence Gap Assessment — a 4-minute check on formation, founder equity, and IP ownership. Run it in week one. Free. {{LINK}}
Pre-fundraise nudge
Investor intro season, office hours follow-up
A reminder before you start taking meetings.
An investor who likes you will ask for a data room within a week. That is when founders find out their formation documents are incomplete, a co-founder's equity was never papered, or a contractor still owns code.
If you ran the Diligence Gap Assessment in week one, run it again — things change. If you didn't, four minutes now beats a stalled term sheet later. {{LINK}}
What you get back
Your cohort report
Every quarter, we send you a de-identified aggregate of how your companies scored. No names, no company identities, no individual answers — patterns only.
Where your cohort is exposed. Which of the three categories your companies fail most often, and by how much.
Curriculum you don't have to invent. The failure patterns tell you exactly which session to add.
Something to show your board. Data on portfolio readiness that nobody else in your market has.
Offered to every program that carries the assessment, on the same terms. It is not tied to volume, and it is not tied to whether anyone becomes a client. The one condition is arithmetic: we need enough responses that no single company can be picked out of the aggregate. See What your founders are told below.
What your founders are told
Your report exists because founders are told about it up front, before they answer a single question. This is the notice they see, word for word, on the first screen of the assessment.
Shown to every founder before question 1
Read this first. This is a self-assessment tool, not legal advice. Completing it does not create an attorney-client relationship with Nerd Lawyer Entrepreneur Services, and your answers are not protected by attorney-client privilege. The questions don't ask for confidential details. Don't add any.
If a program sent you here. When enough companies from a single accelerator, incubator, or startup program have responded, we send that program a summary of how its companies scored as a group. Group patterns only — never your name, your company, or your individual answers. If too few companies from your program have responded to keep that summary anonymous, we don't send one.
What happens next. You get your score. Nobody calls you, and finishing this doesn't put you into a sales sequence. Email curt@nerdlawyer.ai anytime to have your response deleted.
If a founder asks you what happens to their answers, that is the whole answer. You don't need to check with us first.
The terms, plainly
You are handing your founders a link from a law firm. Here is exactly what that does and does not involve.
No money changes hands. We pay nothing for referrals and we accept nothing. Pennsylvania's rules prohibit it, and we would decline anyway.
No exclusivity. Carry other providers, carry competitors, carry whatever serves your founders. This arrangement does not constrain you.
Completing the assessment does not create an attorney-client relationship. It is a self-assessment tool. Founders receive a score and an explanation, not legal advice about their specific situation.
Nobody gets cold-called. Founders see their result and decide for themselves what to do next. There is no sales sequence attached to finishing the form.
Your report is de-identified, and we hold a floor. We never tell you who took it, what any individual answered, or who became a client. If fewer than ten of your companies have responded, we don't send a report at all — in a small cohort, an aggregate stops being anonymous. Founders can have their response deleted on request, which may move that count.
You can pull the link anytime. No notice, no conversation, no hard feelings.
Also worth having on your resources page
No forms, no links back to us, nothing asked of your founders. Reference material you can drop into a Notion page and forget about
Capitalization structure, founder equity, and ownership mechanics, explained without the spreadsheet.
An interactive tool for working out what is actually protectable in an AI or ML product.
If your cohort is IP-heavy and you run a demo day, there's a companion page for the patent side: {{CROSSLINK}}.
Want the walkthrough first?
Twenty minutes. We go through the twelve questions, you decide whether it belongs in your program, and you tell us where you want it placed. If you'd rather just use the link above, do that instead.
Nerd Lawyer Entrepreneur Services, 901 Western Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15233. Curtis Wadsworth, J.D., Ph.D. is responsible for the content of this communication and is licensed to practice law in Pennsylvania and registered to practice before the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
This page is a communication about legal services. It is not legal advice and does not create an attorney-client relationship. Neither does completing the Diligence Gap Assessment. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.