With regards to this a +1 for the enhanced compliance with the discussion and socialization and WFC (ours is a position of vote is law as many WFC cannot be really enforced however). With respect to the fact that recipients are curators we still have not been able to make that separation efficiently on other bounties so this is technically correct but other bounties do the same to some extent. Though, with respect to the fact that many legal services base their work on pre-ensambled rigs and work upon them, it usually makes sense for an industry such as ours which is perceived as high risk by many jurisdictions and entities. It also works for other industries like gambling and adult. Global Networks like Logion obviously help but legal specificity and high degree of choice in a broad number of jurisdictions is something we, as an industry even outside of Polkadot, don't have the luxury to enjoy yet. Even within jurisdictions that are crypto friendly and crypto neutral, finding such services and custom approaches in person is a really challenging process. This comes from our own experience to engage with legal providers on a crypto neutral jurisdiction that many incorporations base their operations at. This is the main concern if we want to see it operate efficiently. What would there be alternative approaches if not this one? would be our counterquestion to this comment.

https://discord.com/channels/961984944656236574/1319256536299864095/1325416970232795267

The solution seems to be an update to a proposed curator set more or less that can be done in a latter referendum for time sake (the curator approval referendum), that could be done as they seem to be open for new curators but no applications have been published yet. We'll be waiting for the proposers and commenter answer.

Is Legal Advice for Startups and Businesses Valuable? Absolutely! That’s why most people instinctively lean toward a “yes” vote for this proposal. We all know how expensive legal advice can be. But in its current form, this proposal is a hard NO. I hope the initiators will use my advice to revise it, and that those who voted “Abstain” will switch to “No.” Let me explain in detail why this is justified:

This is NOT a Bounty.
A true bounty involves experts chosen by the community to evaluate specific, submitted proposals. It allows the community to delegate responsibility to curators and avoid voting on every detail. However, this legal "bounty" is a hybrid bounty, with an external service provider (Amforc). This creates a major conflict of interest:

• If this is a bounty, its purpose is to serve the ecosystem by judging proposals and/or invoices and give them funding.

• If this is a service proposal, it must be presented separately and judged independently. This could be used for creating legal templates etc.

Non-Compliance with Standards approved in Referendum 1254 by Alice&Bob
This proposal does not comply to the bounty compliance standards set by the community. https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/referenda/1254. For example:

• Discussion Period
  Standard: Funding requests must be discussed on governance platforms (for at least 2 weeks.
  Reality: No evidence of such discussions exists. For a legal bounty, which requires understanding Polkadot’s governance, this oversight raises concerns.
• Curator Transparency
  Standard: Curators must have verified on-chain identities and declare conflicts of interest.
  Reality: 
  — Amforc, DonDiego (is this Andréa Vistoli? ) , and Coinstudio have no verified identities mentioned.
  — There is no clarity about who DonDiego or the people behind Coinstudio are.
  — Amforc is both curator and service provider, violating the rule that curators cannot approve payments for their own work (except curator fees).
• Public Communication
  Standard: Bounties must maintain public communication channels, overview pages, and regular progress reports (monthly and quarterly).
  Reality: This proposal lacks any mention of public communication channels, leaving transparency and accountability unaddressed.

Lack of Community Support
The legal experts within our community, such as Lorena and Wario, have already expressed opposition. This is worrying. If we need trusted legal advice, why not involve credible entities like Logion (https://logion.network/), which has a global network of legal officers and proven expertise? (David Schmitz is the CEO, and a Polkadot veteran, in his board he has the secretary of the international union of legal officers ! )

In general, this proposal raises several critical concerns:
• How much of the budget will go to reusable templates, legal setup, or the knowledge hub?
• Why does it lack transparency, governance discussion, and identity verification for curators and recipients?
• How can Amforc act as both curator and executor without creating a conflict of interest?

Therefore, I propose splitting this proposal into two:

1. Legal templates for the Community: Begin with delivering templates and other resources as a standalone service proposal.
2. True legal Bounty: Once trust is established, create a separate legal bounty with fully compliant curators, transparency, and community oversight. Because, as it stands now, this proposal cannot and should not be approved. It fails to meet our community standards, raises too many red flags, and lacks transparency. The Bounty Standard literaly says "we suggest OpenGov denies funding requests if proper scoping and transparency criteria are not fulfilled" Therefore, I urge the community to vote NO. 

@1eGtA_qy31j 

Yes, thank you!

Hi Lorena,

Thanks for your questions and comments. Hope our clarifications help:

1. The services are provided by a law firm. The legal bounty is not the service provider.
   The setup also ensures that only those parties that are able to do so and meet the legal requirements provide services.
   In addition, we only work with law firms that have undergone due diligence. The risks you mentioned are therefore unlikely in this setup.
2. There is no focus on Europe. The legal bounty aims to assist teams and projects all over the world.
3. The service is provided by a specialist in each case. However, the aim of the legal bounty goes even further. The proposed setup stands for cost efficiency, time savings, consistency, knowledge hub/transfer etc.
4. We are confident that the curators will be able to understand an invoice even if they are not lawyers (same idea as a jury in the United States). However, we welcome applications from lawyers as curators.

Hope this helps.

Hi @Lily_Mendz ,

Thanks for asking. Our clarifications:

1. If it is approved, we will choose similar distribution channels as for the IBP - outreach through X (formerly Twitter)/direct channels with teams through e.g. Telegram/availability through contact form.

2. The bounty would be in DOT. Part of the payout for non-third parties would be in locked DOT to highlight our commitment to Polkadot.

3. We trust our curators to bill their work honestly and would certainly open the discussion if billed hours are excessive. The exact amount depends on the overall workload and interest coming to the bounty.

4. Yes. The cap for projects is generally 96 hours per year. External hours would count pro rata towards this limit; if the charge by external partners exceeds the maximum cost per hour mentioned in the bounty (CHF 290.- plus 28 DOT), it will be converted to an equivalent (higher) number of delivered hours so the costs are never exceeding expectations by the community.

5. Regarding educational resources, yes we plan to create a Knowledge Hub on legal topics to make this as easy and useful long-term for the Polkadot ecosystem as possible.

6. Templates will only be accessible to projects within Polkadot to prevent external projects from freeloading off the support of the treasury.

Hope this clears up your questions!

It’s an interesting proposal; I have some questions:

1. If this bounty is approved, how do you plan to make it publicly known that it’s available so interested teams can consult it?

2. Why are payments in DOT included alongside stablecoins? Could everything be paid in stablecoins instead? (for calculation purposes).

3. The hourly payment for curators is reasonable, but it’s missing the maximum number of hours per week that can be billed to the bounty.

4. Is there any mechanism to limit expenses for third-party services?

5. Could more emphasis be placed on educational resources and tools? This would allow projects to prevent legal issues in the future and reduce the need for constant legal interventions.

6. Will the templates be freely accessible, or will projects require additional assistance to use them?

Hello team,

The initiative looks very interesting and promising because the proposal includes regulatory advice, compliance, templates/wiki, etc.

Said that, I consider some points of failure:

1.- ¨One single point of contact (guaranteeing attorney-client privilege) and leverage a large international network of lawyers to obtain the best possible support, from choosing the right setup structure to helping with legal issues, such as contract and corporate law, IP law, data protection, regulatory issues and supervisory law as well as providing legal templates".

I believe that the concept of bounty is distorted because legal services are being provided by a ¨bounty¨ that is not a law firm or company dedicated to providing legal services and is prohibited by the law of many countries. It could be considered illegal practice in the legal profession.

I understand that the bounty should not be providing legal services, it should be curating the services of the projects with the lawyers who have the projects and not provide legal services.

In addition to that, the contingency for Polkadot is huge in case of conflict of interests, misconduct, corruption, lobbying, insider trading, violation of IP etc. of the curators or the lawyers/legal firms.

2.- The full legal service coverage is focused on lawyers based in Switzerland and their extensive network.

Polkadot is a world blockchain with projects all around the world and the service should consider different perspectives and not focus on Europe and its regulations.

3.- Costs of the services

The applicable hourly rates depend on the experience and seniority of the involved professionals and start at CHF 120.- plus 8 DOT up to CHF 290.- plus 28 DOT (DOT locked for 6 months).

The costs of the services are based on payments in Switzerland and it looks unnecessary that the treasury allocates funds to pay an intermediary in Switzerland plus the cost of local lawyers, plus curators.

4.- The legal bounty does not include lawyers?

The curators will receive 80 CHF per hour.

How could the curators curate the work that performs the lawyers and the costs of the services if they are not lawyers?

The legal bounty must include lawyers and the cost should be in hours only to review the performance of the work but should avoid providing legal firms or recommend lawyers.

For that reason, I will vote NAY

Lucky Friday have voted ABSTAIN. Please consider this a temporary notification after our vote has gone on chain. If you would like additional feedback on our rationale for this vote, please join our OpenGov Public Forum on Telegram here: https://t.me/+559tyPSfmGg0NzUx

Lucky Friday provides feedback once per week (Fridays) if specifically requested in our OpenGov Public Forum, and we respectfully ask that all proponents of referenda interact with us here for the sake of transparency. Please tag our Director of Protocol Relations “Phunky” with your referendum number so that he can gather the relevant commentary from our internal deliberations.

@Amforc Appreciate the additional clarity and thoughtful approach here 👍

Dear @wario, thank you for your appreciated feedback.

Curators: We agree on the lawyers as curators point for ensuring the highest standard. Hence, how we structured the current suggested curator set which we are happy to extend with good fits on that side and appreciate any suggestions there.

Payout Calculation: Good point. The proposal states for example that a company formation will cost around USD 1,700 excluding third-party costs. Legal health check packages will also be offered for teams and projects in the Polkadot ecosystem. These shall cover various topics, such as corporate law (shareholders' agreement etc.), trademark/IP law (IP strategies, strengths and weaknesses, IP protection and monitoring, to dos etc.), data protection and possibly even a general regulatory and tax check. Each component in a standard version will be around USD 1,000 to 2,000. However, fees may vary depending on the jurisdiction and special requests. It is therefore difficult to estimate a fixed fee for all possible enquiries, and we will provide fee quotes if an enquiry is beyond the usual range.

Locked DOT: We are strongly committed to the Polkadot ecosystem and wanted to emphasize this by making part of the fee dependent on the development of the DOT price. The proposal aims to boost the Polkadot ecosystem by making it more attractive and to strengthen the projects and teams in the Polkadot ecosystem.

Dear @Flez Thank you for your comment.

We agree with you. It is crucial that each team and each project gets the appropriate lawyer. A US case will be advised by a US lawyer. However, the bounty wants to achieve more and can offer several benefits, particularly within and for the benefit of the Polkadot ecosystem:

• Cost Efficiency: By addressing legal questions centrally, repeated legal fees for similar or identical issues can be avoided. Instead of each team paying a lawyer individually, standardized answers and solutions for common questions could be provided centrally.
• Time Savings: The bounty can support teams more quickly with answers and resources, as it is already familiar with recurring problems and can provide tested solutions.
• Consistency: Centralized legal advice ensures that teams can rely on consistent and reliable information, which is particularly beneficial for areas such as taxation, data protection, regulatory law, labor law, or corporate law.
• Knowledge Transfer: The legal bounty shall act as a knowledge pool, drawing on the experiences of other teams and projects (and still guarantee confidentiality and attorney-client privilege). This makes it easier to share best practices and legal strategies.
• Focus on Innovation: By reducing the administrative and legal burden on teams, especially startups, they can focus more on their core innovations.

Good idea but coverage needs to be split up by geo... e.g., US based startups should be represented by a US based law firm, etc.

This is a great idea, but in my opinion, it needs to be polished further. Here are my comments:

Lawyers as Curators: Since you’ll be curating legal work, having lawyers is essential. This should be non-negotiable to ensure the credibility and quality of the curation.

Payout Calculation: The pricing mechanism seems a bit tricky. To make it more efficient, I suggest exploring packages specifically designed for team collaborations (not by hour) and without locked dot.

From your proposal, I can see that you have the necessary knowledge to drive this forward. However, this still seems like a grey area with some uncertainties. What’s your opinion on this discussion?

https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/post/2628

shut up and take my money!

Interesting initiative, it would also be an excellent bridge between any initiative requiring legal advice and any contracts to be submitted to the PCF.