Six Months Later, Three Start-Ups Find Their Goals Are Elusive

That's a meaningful distinction to make because it involves different skills, a different assumption of risk, and a different level of tenacity needed to be successful in one or the other.

So startup = selling something different. It's about pitching people your idea, and positioning a product creatively in the market. New business is about being seen (e.g. consider starting a franchise pizza shop and advertising on local TV/in print). It's "new" because people didn't know it was there before. But it's not "startup" for lack of its differentiation along the lines of how that something is sold.

I like this defition because it permits that a new company that sells the same old product (e.g. Threadless and their tees) may be called a startup for its ability to creatively position their products.

Exactly when a company transitions from "startup" to "going conern" is another question.

A few more characteristics of a start-up: 1. Technology (often web based) plays the key role in the interaction between the company and it's clients / users. 2. The present market either doesn't exist, or functions in a fundamentally different way before / outside of the startup. 3. The start-up is not as geographically limitted as the new business. That's not to say that a start-up can't be location specific, but if it is, it should be a platform that can be applied to other locations.

And a few characteristics of a new business: 1. A new business, like a say a bakery, is another instance of a proven business that addresses the market in the accepted, historical way. There are many bakeries, they are fundamentally no different from each other. In fact, it's likely one of the oldest professions still still actively being pursued. Each takes raw ingredients and makes baked goods out of them. Each then try to sell them for more than their costs. 2. New businesses are often very location specific and often rely heavily on face to face interaction, or local phone/email interaction to complete transactions. 3. New businesses often rely on physical goods or services for the basis of their offering, where with start-ups technology is often the basis for the interaction.

Selling your new-businesses good via an online store, does not automatically make your new-business a start-up. In the case of the t-shirt entrepenuer and the baker, they are most certainly not start-ups, but just new-businesses trying to do business online.

In short, a start-up is a new business, but a new business is not necessarily a start-up.

In fact most of the menial work in many law firms are done by juniors (new graduates) or legal-executives ("executives" being people who have little or no law qualification but are able to do the work).

In my old firm (http://www.lawdit.co.uk), which I setup years ago with my friends, this was and still is the case in many ways.

I have seen the internals of many other leading firms (Allen & Overy, Ashurst, etc.) that also do this.

Hence, regardless of how powerful the legal lobby against an uptake of such outsource practice, I dare say, the bottom-line and almighty dollar will win in many cases.

After all, if you are getting the same/better quality at a lower cost and faster turn-around (3 people working on a task instead of 1) what would you do?

The precedents have already been set in other fields/industries so I expect it will not cause as much furore as one might imagine and will probably start with the thin end of the wedge i.e. no-win-no-fee farms.

Time will tell :)

People think you have to be crazy to start a start-up these days. No even close, but you would have to be crazy to start a bakery now!