MCD Law Partners merges with Baer Crossey to offer legal services to startups

Fort Washington-based MCD Law Partners, a boutique law firm oriented toward startups in the region, is merging with Center City-based law firm, Baer Crossey.

Baer Crossey, a relatively small firm itself, provides legal services to entrepreneurs in the area.

Christopher McDemus, the founding and only partner of MCD Law Partners, will join the three-man group as Managing Partner. You might know him as VC Deal Lawyer from his blog of the same name. [Full Disclosure: VC Deal Lawyer has been a past Technically Philly event sponsor.]

McDemus told Technically Philly that the merger came about as he was trying to figure out how to grow his practice, with just one full time partner — him — and one part-time of counsel, Rebecca Weaver.

“You reach a sort of tipping point where you have to consciously decide, “Do I keep growing this, and find a scalable way to do that, or do I keep it at the current size which is manageable for a solo,” McDemus said. “There’s risk in the latter and, frankly, sitting still isn’t really in my nature so I decided on smart growth.”

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Apparently, early stage investors aren’t endangered

This post originally ran on Philly VC Deal Lawyer a blog about Philly startups by Christopher McDemus. It is re-purposed here with permission, as part of a partnership.

You may recall my earlier post from a few weeks ago entitled “Are True Early Stage Investors An Endangered Species?“  After laying down some background, I took the position that super-angel funds and incubators/accelerators (e.g., Y Combinator, TechStars, DreamIt), had the best chance of solving the early stage funding gap and that capital efficiencies and bootstrapping might help temporarily fill in some of the other holes.  Since I wrote that post, there’s been a lot of online traffic surrounding this issue.

Much of it was ignited by conversations emanating out of Y Combinator’s AngelConf on July 29th.  All of the new super-angel funds popping up in the past few weeks just add to the fervor.  Just today, the WSJ put out a piece noting that Aydin Senkut (former Googler) is closing a $40M super-angel fund, which follows Ron Conway’s $20M super-angel fund, Chris Sacca’s (former Googler) $8.5M super-angel fund, Dave McClure’s (former PayPal’r) $30M super-angel fund and Mike Maples’ new $73.5M super-angel fund.

Here are some of the articles that popped up since my last piece:

Read the rest here.

VC Roundup: DreamIt in Forbes Magazine

Welcome to the VC Round-up, where we’ll parse through venture capital news related to Philadelphia-based private equity firms and the companies they fund. Subscribe to the roundup as an email newsletter. If you have any VC-related news to pass along to us, please drop us a line.

DEFINITE READS

Edit: Kerry Rupp clears up a few facts in the comments below.

DreamIt Ventures gets a feature in this month’s Forbes focusing on managing partners Steven Welch, Kerry Rupp, Michael Levinson and David Book. The story provides a digestible overview for those not familiar with the University City Science Center-based business incubator and provides lots of numbers and personal backstory for those more knowledgeable about the program. The most surprising fact uncovered by Forbes: none of the companies incubated by DreamIt have turned a profit. Look out for our Demo Day preview on Wednesday to get a sneak peak at some of the companies in this year’s class.

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