I would strongly discourage relying on accountants for legal advice :) In my experience, very few get it right, at least for startups.
If you’re raising money, you probably don’t want to be an S corp because of all the restrictions on stockholders there are for S corps. For that reason, S corps are not common at all for startups (the only people that say otherwise are people that think just about any new company is a startup).
Between LLCs and C corporations, it’s often actually cheaper to go with C corporation because they are more standardized. Even if you were to work with a law firm, the setup you’d get from any reputable startup attorney is going to be highly recognizable to any other reputable startup attorney. With LLCs, everything gets a lot more custom, which means more legal spend.
IMO the only reason to go with an LLC is if there was a significant chance that you will want to distribute profits to owners. This isn’t the case for most startups (at least as defined by this subreddit) because you’re going to grow and scale quicker by using any profit to hire more people.
Clerky co-founder here — worth noting that using Clerky and working with an attorney aren’t mutually exclusive. A lot of startups use us with their attorney. You’d just have your attorney review the information you’re putting into Clerky, which is super quick (and thus cheap).
In general, I’d recommend working with a startup attorney (with or without Clerky) if you need legal advice. In the US, only law firms can provide legal advice. If you’re ever unsure about whether you need legal advice or not, feel free to reach out to us and we can give our thoughts, even if you haven’t used Clerky yet. We’re also more than happy to help recommend startup attorneys if needed!
My experience is that nearly all good, experienced startup attorneys are pretty comfortable with working with startups that formed on Clerky. A huge percentage of YC companies form on Clerky and that would not be happening if we were causing problems for them. Where we usually see friction is with attorneys that work more with regular small businesses than actual startups (e.g. attorneys that aren’t spending most of their time on VC financings).
BTW if you use Clerky and run into issues working with a lawyer later on, please definitely reach out and we’ll do our best to help however we can. With the wrong attorneys, there can often be some confusion or misinformation, so much so that we’ve put together some help center content on what to do in that situation.
We (Clerky) have products for all of this, but worth noting that the fundraising products are for convertible notes and safes. If you’re doing an equity financing, you’ll want to work with a startup attorney (there’s no good online service for this that I’m aware of).
A lot of startups use our hiring products for this. It’s worth noting though that the forms were designed for U.S. workers, so it is possible that there are some countries where you would want to make modifications. The best thing to do would be to work with a startup attorney, who would probably need to reach out to colleagues in overseas offices or else find a firm in the worker’s jurisdiction to consult with. That can get expensive though, of course. There are PEOs out there that solve this problem (though from what I hear, with varying degrees of legal quality), for a price.
Definitely work with a startup attorney on this. There is no way to do this safely with any online service (though Clerky could be used for bits and pieces of the overall process).