Framing small acquisitions as 'business transactions' slashes legal fees by half.
Jesse Tinsley · The 48-Hour Rescue That Turned Into a Profitable Acquisition · Nov 11, 2025 · at 12:04
Jesse Tinsley, CEO of Main Street, explains a cost-saving tactic for negotiating legal diligence fees on small software acquisitions.
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“You call a bunch of lawyers and ask, I'm doing an acquisition. They're immediately gonna say, you know, a hundred to a 150 K, right? That's like a price point, right? But if you say I'm doing a business transaction, which is True, technically, the small scale, right? A lot of these, like, deals are basically, like, small, like, partnerships or businesses, like, they're, you can call them acquisitions, but they're small scale. They're really business transactions, and you just have the lawyer charge you hourly for that. The business transaction is going to cost you 25 or fifty-k, but because you say it's an acquisition, like, the framing of it now is instantly a higher benchmark, even though the hours are the same”
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