I learned how to do deals from Len Fassler. Last week, I got an email from Dustin Kloempken, who sent me a few quotes he wrote down from the Berkshire Annual Meeting. One of them jumped out at me.

“Turn every page. One important ingredient in the investment field that very few people do. And those people who did read every page aren’t telling you what they learned. You have to read every page.“

In 1996, I was sitting in a law firm conference room in NYC next to Len. We were working on the legal documents for Sage Hosting’s (which we renamed Interliant after we merged with a company named Interliant) first acquisition. It was tiny—a web hosting company doing maybe $100,000 of revenue annually. We had decided to buy this tiny company to get going.

Len read every page of the legal draft of the purchase agreement and marked it up. After reading a page, he’d slide it over to me to read and see what he’d marked up. We had the disclosure document, so we went through those pages.

By 1996, I’d done a lot of angel investments and a few VC investments, but only a few acquisitions. And, I’d deferred to the lawyers on the legal documents. While I generally knew what was happening, there was plenty of fine print that I hadn’t bothered to read or understand.

After an hour, I asked Len why he was going through every page. He told me, “Brad, in any document you sign, you should turn every page. It’s good practice for any document you read, but even if you are skimming, turn every page to make sure you don’t miss anything.”

I bought a green felt-tip pen and started doing this. As documents became predominantly online, I opened them and turned every page. I read every email I received. Even when I skim a book, I turn every page.

Today, I received many Docusigns with just the signature page. This bugs me, and I often ask for the entire document before I sign. Given that I’ve looked at a zillion legal documents, I can turn every page pretty quickly. But I still turn every page in a board package, a legal document that is new to me, or a long paper (academic or white paper) that someone sends me.

Fortunately, I’m a fast reader and have high reading comprehension. I can also read by paragraph (vs. by sentence), so skimming works for looking for things that are out of place.

I love it when people put easter eggs in documents to see if they get read. For example, a set of Return Path board minutes from about a decade ago had something like the following paragraph.

“After our lunch break, where we enjoyed Shake Shack, Mr. Feld drank two Shake Shack Chocolate Shakes in rapid succession. After a few minutes, he had to lie on the floor and nap for about 30 minutes.”

Turn every page—great advice from Len Fassler and Warren Buffett.

Fred Wilson, Joanne Wilson, Amy, and I are doing our second Monthly Match. This one is in support of the National Immigration Law Center. We will be matching $20,000 of contributions that our respective communities make to NILC.

We’ve made it easy to contribute – simply go to this page on Crowdrise.

Any level of contribution is super helpful. Since we are matching 1:1, each dollar you contribute gets NILC another dollar.

The four of us did this on an impulse last month after the Executive Order on Immigration hit. We were all extremely upset about the executive order and decided to do something about it. We ended up raising over $120,000 for the ACLU over the weekend during a period where the ACLU got a lot of visibility for making the first major move against the executive order and ended up raising over $24m.

As a result, we’ve decided to do a Monthly Match fundraiser (where the four of us match $20,000 in donations) for a different organization that supports the rights of minorities who we feel are at risk under our current administration. We’ve committed to do this for a year and expect this will evolve as things unfold over the course of the year.

The National Immigration Law Center was established in 1978 and is dedicated to defending and advancing the rights of low-income immigrants. Their mission is clear.

At NILC, we believe that all people who live in the U.S.—regardless of their race, gender, immigration and/or economic status—should have the opportunity to achieve their full potential. Over the years, we’ve been at the forefront of many of the country’s greatest challenges when it comes to immigration issues, and play a major leadership role in addressing the real-life impact of polices that affect the ability of low-income immigrants to prosper and thrive.

If this is important to you, please join in on our Monthly Match and make a contribution to NILC. To make sure we see it, follow the directions below:

1. Go to our monthly match page and hit the donate button and give whatever you feel like giving (min is $10).
2. After you complete the donation, TWEET your donation out on the post donation page. That will register it for our match.
3. If you don’t use Twitter, you can forward your email receipt. The instructions will be on the post donation page. We would vastly prefer you tweet it out.

For those of you who are part of our community and support this effort, feel good that you are taking a specific action today to support the rights of all immigrants in America.

Dave Jilk, my partner in Feld Technologies, recently dug up a bunch of old stuff. I blogged one of the documents recently – The Simple Formal Beginnings Of Feld Technologies – and have a few other fun ones coming.

Today, let’s look at another example of a contract that we signed in the context of “keeping it simple.” Over the seven years we were in business, we used a very simple form we referred to as a “Professional Services Agreement.” This was the document that we signed with almost all of our clients. Every now and then we had to deal with something more complicated, but even large companies typically were willing to sign this agreement in 1990.

Over the life of Feld Technologies, we were never sued. We had our share of difficult client situations and were fired a few times, but were always direct and straightforward in how we dealt with stuff. We tried to always keep it at a business level and have a personal relationship with our clients so that when projects got into a difficult place, we could get together and work them out directly. And even when the answer was to part ways, we were always graceful about it.

The PSA shown above is our standard, but listing us as the client and MaK Technologies as the vendor. I believe it’s the first piece of business for MaK Technologies, a company co-founded by my long time and close friend Warren Katz. Dave and I met Warren through his wife Ilana, who was the employee #7 at Feld Technologies.

One of our clients was Monitor Company, at the time a young but very rapidly growing consulting firm in Cambridge. They used a bunch of Sun Workstations for all of their presentations (this was in the time of Harvard Graphics – well before the ubiquity of PowerPoint – which was completely inadequate for what they did). Instead, they used the Sun’s and Interleaf running on Unix. While we had a lot of hardware and networking expertise, we didn’t do anything with Unix (we were all about DOS and Novell Netware) so we subcontracted Warren’s company to help us with the Unix stuff at Monitor.

Warren and I have done many things together – some that have worked and some that haven’t. Twenty-two years later we still do business with a handshake. Warren has a great chapter about this in Do More Faster. Remember – keep it simple.

I have 2,143 lawyer jokes queued up.  Here’s a good one:

The devil visited a lawyer’s office and made him an offer. “I can arrange some things for you, " the devil said. “I’ll increase your income five-fold. Your partners will love you; your clients will respect you; you’ll have four months of vacation each year and live to be a hundred. All I require in return is that your wife’s soul, your children’s souls, and their children’s souls rot in hell for eternity.”  The lawyer thought for a moment. “What’s the catch?” he asked.

Now some of my good friends are lawyers and several of my very best friends are ex-lawyers.  You probably know one of them – my partner at Foundry Group – Jason Mendelson.  When Jason started his blog, he made the wise choice of starting a series titled Law Firm 2.0.  His first post – Why Start-up Lawyers Frustrate Me – pissed off all of his lawyer friends, generated 54 comments, and was reprinted all over the place.  Not a bad start for a blog.

He continued posting about Law Firm 2.0.  One day he was approached by some interesting folks at a company called FirstDocs who shared a lot of similar ideas.  You can read about it more in Jason’s post Our Investment in Law Firm 2.0*.*  The outcome, as you might expect, is that we closed an investment in FirstDocs at the end of last year.

Now, we usually do not invest in companies aimed at vertical markets.  However, we make exceptions when we have extremely deep domain knowledge and expertise.  In addition, we view having past success as a bonus, such as our previous experience in the legal vertical market with Stratify (which Iron Mountain acquired in 2007.) 

A lawyer died and arrived at the pearly gates. To his dismay, there were thousands of people ahead of him in line to see St. Peter. But, to his surprise, St. Peter left his desk at the gate and came down the long line to where the lawyer was standing. St. Peter greeted him warmly. Then St. Peter and one of his assistants took the lawyer by the hands and guided him up to the front of the line into a comfortable chair by his desk. The lawyer said, “I don’t mind all this attention, but what makes me so special?” St. Peter replied, “Well, I’ve added up all the hours for which you billed your clients, and by my calculation you must be about 193 years old!” (ahajokes)

I look forward to seeing Jason, Dan Gaffney, and the team at FirstDocs increase the efficiency of lawyers.